THE MEANING OF 
THE CREED 

PAPERS ON THE APOSTLES' CREED 



EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY THE 

REV. G. K. A. BELL 

CHAPLAIN TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 
1917 



PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND 
BY THE 

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 
68, HAYMARKET, LONDON, S.W. 



1^1 frj 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 
I. Faith 



PAGE 

V 



' I believe " 

T. B. Strong, D.D., Dean of Christ Church. 

II. God 19 

" In God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth : " 
C. F. D'Arcy, D.D., Bishop of Down. 

III. The Meaning of the Incarnation .... 39 

"And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was con- 
ceived by the Holy Ghost " 

A. Nairne, D.D., Professor of Hebrew, 

King's College, London. 

IV. Jesus Christ and History 63 

" Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate," 

V. H. Stanton, D.D. , Regius Professor of 
Divinity, University of Cambridge. 

V. Jesus Christ and Sin 79 

" Was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into Hell ; " 

J. K. MOZLEY, B.D., Dean of Pembroke 
College, Cambridge. 

VI. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ .... 97 

" The third day He rose again from the dead," 

H. S. Holland, D.D., Regius Professor of 
Divinity, University of Oxford. 

VII. The Ascension of Jesus Christ . . . .111 

" He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of 
God the Father Almighty ; " 

F. H. Chase, D.D., Bishop of Ely. 

VIII. Jesus Christ as Judge 131 

' ' From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead." 

H. B, SwETE, D.D., Late Regius Professor of 
Divinity, University of Cambridge. 



iv CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IX. The Holy Spirit 147 

" I believe in the Holy Ghost ; " 

R. G. Parsons, M.A., Late Principal of Wells 
Theological College. 

X. The Holy Trinity 165 

H. L. GoUDGE, D.D., Principal of 
Ely Theological College. 

XI. The Church 186 

" The Holy Catholick Church ; " 

J. N. Figgis, Litt.D., C. R., Hon. Fellow of 
St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. 

XII. The Communion of Saints 209 

" The Communion of Saints ; " 

A. E. J. Rawlinson, M.A., Student of 
Christ Church, Oxford. 

XIII. Forgiveness . . .227 

" The Forgiveness of sins ; " 

L. S. Thornton, M.A., C. R., Late Scholar of 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. 

XIV. The Life after Death 244 

The Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." 

R. H. Malden, M.A., Principal of 
Leeds Clergy School. 



Bibliography 



263 



INTRODUCTION 



I 

The Meaning of the Creed is the title given to 
fourteen papers on the articles of the Apostles' 
Creed now collected in a single volume. These 
papers were printed first of all as separate tracts, 
under the supervising editorship of the two Regius 
Professors of Divinity in the Universities of Oxford 
and Cambridge, Dr. H. S. Holland and Dr. V. H. 
Stanton ; and they were issued in direct connection 
with the National Mission of Repentance and 
Hope, as part of the literature produced under 
its auspices. That Mission, as has been stated 
many times, was and is (for it is still in progress) 
a Mission of the Church, the aim of which is ''to 
call the men and women of England to earnest and 
honest repentance of our sins and shortcomings 
as a nation, and to claim that in the Living Christ — 
in the loyal acceptance of Him as the Lord of all 
life, individual and social — lies the one sure Hope 
in the light of which the strain, the sorrows and the 
sacrifices of the war, and the task of renewal and 
reconstruction when the war is over, may be 
faced." But it was recognised by all who had to 
do both with the initiation and the general work 
of the Mission that to persuade men to this loyal 



vi 



INTRODUCTION 



acceptance of the Living Christ many things 
besides mere calling and claiming were necessary. 
In particular it was said that the endeavour which 
must lie at the root of the whole project was the 
removal, if it may be, of j)op^lar misconception 
as to the character of the Gospel message and its 
relation to the daily life of ordinary men and 
women." It would seem therefore that the publi- 
cation of a short series of tracts, or explanatory 
papers, by well-known theologians, designed for 
ordinary men and women " without a special 
philosophical training and yet with their minds 
awake to the problems of theology and seeking for 
light, would be of real assistance to this end. Such 
is the origin of these papers, which have now been 
reset and bound together, and supplemented with 
a bibliography kindly contributed by one of the 
writers. 

II 

A word or two may perhaps be of use as to the 
purpose of creeds themselves, and then as to the 
source, so far as that is known, of the Apostles' 
Creed. 

A great many people seem to think that creeds 
are an excrescence of the Christian religion ; a 
sort of *^ extra" imposed upon mankind by rigid 
and designing ecclesiastics. We are reproached 
for our " cold Christs and tangled Trinities," and 
the implication is that they are cold, or tangled 
because our creeds have made them so. A creed 
is a fetter on thought, so the charge runs, and in 
the new age of freedom such fetters must go. 



INTRODUCTION 



vii 



It is not to be denied that there is some justifi- 
cation for the charge, in the way in which we some- 
times talk about and use the creeds. But as a 
matter of fact all the best Christian teachers agree 
that the Christian Creed, whatever its form, has a 
very different origin and serves a very different 
purpose. A creed is a personal affirmation of 
belief. Credo in Deum Patrem ojnnipotentem. . . . 
Et in lesum Christum Filium eius unicum. . . . 
Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, 1 believe in God 
the Father Almighty. . . . And in Jesus Christ 
His only Son. ... I believe in the Holy Ghost. 
But it is most important to remember that the 
Creed, though an affirmation, never pretended 
to explain the Christian faith, much less to 
exhaust it. 

First of all it was intended to assert the his- 
torical basis of the Christian Religion. It recorded 
facts which had taken place in the visible Avorld, 
and insisted that the Revelation which was at its 
centre was a Revelation in history. Such a " con- 
fession " of the chief facts of the evangelical story 
was very early recognised to be necessary as well 
in dealing with those outside the Church as in 
assuring those within it. Of this we have various 
important indications in the New Testament itself. 
There is, for example, the statement of St. Paul 
in Romans x. 10: *'For with the heart man be- 
lieveth unto righteousness, and with the mouth 
confession is made unto salvation"; and again 
the summary of the words" in which he had 
preached the Gospel to the Corinthians: '*I de- 
livered unto you first of all that which I also 
received, how that Christ died for our sins according 



viii 



INTRODUCTION 



to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and 
that He hath been raised again the third day 
according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor. xv. 1-4). 
There is the eunuch's confession before he was 
baptised, which, whether it is authentic or not 
in this particular instance of a baptism, at least 
points to a very early practice connected with 
baptism: ''I believe that Jesus is the Son of 
God " (Acts viii. 37). And there are also fragments 
of primitive Christian hymns, as in 1 Timothy 
iii. 16: 

He who was manifested in the flesh, 
Justified in the spirit, 

Seen of angels, 
Preached among the nations, 
Believed on in the world, 

Received up in glory " : 

in which some of the articles of the Christian belief 
are summarised. 

But in addition to this historical motive of the 
Christian Creed, we have also to remember that, 
especially with the longer creeds, a very prominent 
function of the creed was its negative purpose. It 
was meant to rule out particular rationalistic 
explanations, and to protest against dogmatic 
denials of certain things which the Christian be- 
lieved to be fundamental. Thus Richard Hooker, 
in discussing the Incarnation of the Son of God, 
writes as follows : — 

*'It is not in man's ability either to express 
perfectly or conceive the manner how this was 
brought to pass. But the strength of our faith 
is tried by those things wherein our wits and 
capacities are not strong. Howbeit, because this 



INTEODUCTION 



ix 



divine mystery is more true than plain, divers 
having framed the same to their own conceits 
and fancies are found in their expositions thereof 
more plain than true. Insomuch that by the 
space of five hundred years after Christ, the 
Church was almost troubled with nothing else 
saving only with care and travel to preserve this 
article from the sinister construction of heretics " 

Ecclesiastical Polity," Book V. ch. Hi.). 

Accordingly, in mere self-defence, the Church 
was bound to make certain large affirmations of 
its own. Those affirmations are not the Reve- 
lation, nor the complete explanation of the Reve- 
lation, but its safeguard, a protection of the 
Revelation against error. 

Ill 

In very early days, certainly before the end of 
the second century, a formal and public acknow- 
ledgment of the Christian faith was associated 
with the Sacrament of Baptism. In the closing 
verses of the first Gospel it is stated that Our 
Lord bade His disciples " make disciples of all 
nations, baptising them in the Name of the Father, 
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost " (St. 
Matthew xxviii. 19). It was therefore natural 
that the new converts, when they were made 
disciples and were baptised, should acknowledge 
their belief in the Father, and the Son, and the 
Holy Ghost, in whose Name they were baptised. 
And it is most probable that the arrangement and 
order of the Creed, as we have it now, was deter- 
mined bv this fact ; the three paragraphs of the 

b 



X 



INTRODUCTION 



Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed being con- 
cerned first with the Father, then with the Son, 
and thirdly with the Holy Ghost. 

In the beginning such public acknowledgment, 
or Creed, would be of the simplest and shortest 
kind ; and later certain amplifications would be 
added, and, as the history of the Creeds shews, 
these additions were always made as a pre- 
cautionary or protective measure. 

Of the three Creeds, commonly known as 
The Apostles' Creed, The Niceiie Creed and The 
Quicunque Vult, the first is pre-eminently the 
Baptismal Creed. It is the shortest, and, though 
in its present form the latest, in substance it is 
the earliest of the Creeds ; and it confines itself 
on the whole to certain simple statements of the 
old historical faith. 

The Nicene Creed belongs to another class, the 
class of Conciliar Creeds. That is to say, it is 
the work of a great Council of the Church, taking 
its first shape in the Council of Nicea a.d. 325, and 
bemg approved in almost exactly its present form 
(though there is one important exception) by the 
Council of Chalcedon a.d. 451. It is more elabo- 
rate than the Apostles' Creed and adds theological 
interpretations to the simple and brief statements 
which that Creed contains. It is the Creed 
especially of the Eastern Church, as the Apostles' 
Creed belongs to the Western Church. But used 
alike in East and West, in the East in the Sacra- 
ments of Baptism and Holy Communion, in the 
West in the Sacrament of Holy Communion, it 
stands out pre-eminently as the great Creed of 
the Church. 



INTRODUCTION 



xi 



The Quicunqiie Vult, " the Confession of our 
Christian faith, commonly called the Creed of 
St, Athanasius,^^ is quite unlike either of the other 
Creeds. Much has been written upon it and its 
origin. It will be sufficient here to say that it was 
probably composed in the fifth century by a writer 
in the south of France ; that in course of time it 
came to be sung as a canticle, in very much the 
same way as the Te Deum ; and that later still 
it was used as a Sermon or Commentary on the 
Baptismal Creed. The translation of the Quicunque 
Vult contained in the Book of Common Prayer, 
printed immediately after the Order for Evening 
Prayer under the heading "At Morning Prayer," 
is generally acknowledged to be misleading in 
certain particulars ; and attention may be drawn 
to the revised translation prepared by a Com- 
mittee appointed as a result of the Lambeth 
Conference 1908, and published by S.P.C.K.* 

It has been stated above that the Apostles' Creed 
is in substance the earliest of the three Creeds. An 
old legend relates that after the Ascension, on the 
eve of departing from one another on their several 
journeys, the Apostles composed the Apostles' 
Creed as a standard of their future preaching," 
each contributing a single clause ; and at the end 
of the fourth century it was commonly believed 
that this was an accurate account of the origin 
of the Creed. But though this is manifestly 
untrue, and though the Creed is not the Apostles' 
Creed in the sense that it was actually composed 
by the Apostles, it is the Apostles' Creed in the 
sense that it represents what the Apostles taught, 

* 1910. Price 2d, 



xii 



INTEODUGTION 



and contains many phrases which are found in 
the Apostohc writings. In its present form it is 
based on an old Eoman Creed quoted by an Italian 
Presbyter, Eufinus, at the end of the fourth 
century, and by Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra, fifty 
years earlier. The form of this old Koman Creed 
is as follows : — 

I. i. I believe in God tlie Father almiglity ; 
II. ii. And in Christ Jesus His only Son our Lord, 

iii. Who was born of the Holy Spirit, from Mary the 

Virgin, 

iv. crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, 
V. the third day He rose from the dead, 

vi. He ascended into heaven, 

vii. sitteth at the right hand of the Father, 

viii. thence He shall come to judge living and dead. 
III. ix. And in the Holy Ghost, 

X. the Holy Church, 

xi. the remission of sins, 

xii. the resurrection of the flesh. 

This Koman Creed can itseK be traced back to 
the middle of the second century, and possibly 
earlier still to the very first years of that century, 
i.e, to the generation which immediately follows 
the generation of the Apostles. From a com- 
paratively early date variations and additions are 
to be found in the Creed, as it was used in different 
local churches, till finally it is to be read in exactly 
the form in which we are used to it, in the pages 
of Pirminius, a Bishop who worked in France and 
Germany, in the first part of the eighth century. 
And it is in this enlarged form that the Apostles' 
Creed has prevailed throughout the West. 



THE 

MEAMNG OF THE CEEED 



I 



FAITH 



I believe.' 



'HE word " faith " describes a variety of 



1 states of mind. In the language of religion 
it has a special meaning which depends largely 
upon the peculiar subject-matter of religion. 
Its use is not confined to this special subject- 
matter : it has associations with ordinary secular 
life, and it is well to begin with these in order to 
ascertain as clearly as possible its religious 
meaning. 

If I arrive at the station of a strange town 
in order to visit its cathedral or other building of 
interest, I shall probably ask the first man 1 
meet to point out to me the nearest way. He 
will be in no way surprised at being addressed by 
a perfect stranger : he will give me an answer, 
clear or obscure according to his intelligence, 
and I shall proceed to act upon his answer without 
demur. 

When a man is feeling ill he usually sends for 
a doctor. The doctor recommends him to do a 
number of highly unpleasant things — to alter 




6 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



his diet, and break through habits which he has 
long indulged. The majority of men do not know 
enough about the state of their bodies or the 
conditions of health to understand why these 
injunctions are made ; but, unless they propose 
to take their case into their own hands, they do 
as they are told. 

In early years a child has little idea of the 
world and the right way of dealing with it. All 
his life is determined for him, and he exercises 
his own will within the very narrow circle of his 
surroundings. He constantly acts as others direct ; 
even his ideas are insensibly formed and governed 
by those of his parents and others with whom he 
lives. If he breaks loose and acts upon his own 
responsibility he is likely to come to harm : it is 
his wisdom and his happiness to obey. 

All these are cases of the exercise of faith, and 
they have one thing in common ; in each case 
the agent wills and acts beyond the limits of his 
actual knowledge. If I argue with the man who 
tells me the way and require to have his direction 
proved to me, I shall be asking for something that 
I can best get by taking the road pointed out to 
me, and not otherwise : and I shall be insulting 
my informant by suspecting him, at any rate in 
appearance, of deceit. So I must go beyond the 
point at which I know if I am to make use of his 
answer. In like manner, the man who consults 
his physician does so because he does not, of his 
own knowledge, understand how to deal with his 
body ; he does not wait to act upon the advice 
until he has reasoned it all out for himself. Still 
more, the child is called upon to act beyond the 



FAITH 



7 



limits of his own knowledge : he has the benefit 
of his parents' knowledge and experience, and, 
in many cases, is not only unaware of the reasons 
for the action of his parent, but would be unable 
to appreciate them if they were set out before him. 

Thus, in all these cases — and the same is true 
of endless others — faith implies action beyond the 
limits of knowledge. And this feature has caught 
the attention of the popular mind, so that it has 
been wrongly assumed that the essential element 
in faith is ignorance. This is a mistake which 
has very unfortunate consequences. It is a 
mistake, because the real ground upon which a 
man acts in faith is not the fact that he is ignorant, 
but the belief that the person whom he trusts 
has the knowledge necessary for the occasion, 
and the disposition to give others the advantage 
of it. When I ask the way, I am doubtless ignorant 
of the answer or I should not put the question. 
But when I act on the information I receive I 
do so because I believe that my informant knows, 
and that he is honest and will not deceive me. 
This is the positive and determining ground of 
my action. It is the same in the other two cases. 
I consult the physician because I am ignorant, 
but I act on my faith in his knowledge and good- 
will. In both these cases the occasion for the 
exercise of faith is, in a sense, accidental : it 
arises out of particular circumstances, and the 
ignorance which starts the inquiry is a prominent 
feature in the transaction. The position of the 
child is different. His whole life is dependent 
upon his parents, and rests upon his confidence 
in them ; but here also his faith is established 



8 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



upon his positive confidence in his parents, and 
not upon his own deficiencies. It is continually 
being justified and strengthened by experience, if his 
home is a good one, so that he is able to sustain 
" trials of faith " and to surmount difficulties. 
His faith grows as his knowledge of them grows, 
and survives even when his dependence has 
passed into independence and friendship. • 

It is of great importance to emphasise the 
positive side of faith ; to forget it and to lay stress 
upon the other leads to various kinds of mischief 
and error. Most of the misunderstandings and 
perversions of the idea of faith come from this 
mistake. Faith is always closely allied to reason ; 
it always, when it is right faith, assumes a rational 
order ; it goes beyond the point of knowledge, 
but it does so in the belief that the contents of 
knowledge and of faith will ultimately be found 
to be continuous and in harmony. The lack of 
this conviction is the most fruitful error of delusion 
and deception. The credulous man is he who 
has no conception of a rational order, or a false 
one, and is therefore at the mere}" of any one who 
appeals to his imagination. Hence the pros- 
perity of various types of quack and swindler. 
Their victims have no valid, general idea of the 
world and its order, or of the way in which com- 
mercial enterprise actually works. They desire 
health, or they desire riches, and they easily give 
in to the seduction of schemes which promise 
them one or the other. In a perverted sense they 
may be said to have faith in those who swindle 
them ; in truth their action is quite irrational, 
which faith never is ; it depends upon general 



FAITH 



9 



ignorance, or ignorance in some special depart- 
ment of life, or upon some particular state of the 
emotional or nervous system. It is hardly 
necessary to point out the effect of the anxiety 
caused by the present war upon the veracity and 
the credulity of ordinarily sensible people. 

Faith, then, in ordinary life is a rational 
process, by which the mind attains to conclusions 
and acts in advance of positive knowledge or 
logical deduction. The man so acting probably 
thinks that if he knew more he would obtain 
his conclusions by demonstration ; he is prepared 
to act upon it in anticipation of this, because 
he trusts the goodwill, or the knowledge, or the 
combmed goodwill and knowledge of some one 
else. This leads us to notice another common 
feature in the exercise of faith. It is not merely 
an intellectual process by which a particular result 
is attained, it is also an act of confidence in the 
character of a person. I believe what I am told, 
or I do what I am told because I have confidence 
in the person from whom I get information or 
commands. This element enters into all mani- 
festations of faith, but it is obviously one which 
may vary greatly in degree. Personal confidence 
is at its lowest, though it is certainly present, 
when I accept the information from a casual 
stranger. It is most fully and comprehensively 
displaj^ed in the confidence of a child in its parents. 
This is a confidence which not only covers a 
particular incident, or set of circumstances, it 
affects the whole life of both parties. It is on 
this side that we approach religious faith — the 
faith which rests upon God. 



10 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



It is probable that there is no such effective 
way of understanding what faith in God means 
as by considering the relation of parent and child. 
We are not involved in the complicated question 
of the early historj^ of religious ideas. For the 
purpose of this paper the fundamental fact of 
all religion — a belief in God — must be taken as 
our starting point. In its early stages the faith 
in God, like the child's faith in his parent, is 
inarticulate. It is rather a kind of atmosphere 
in which life is spent than a definite and articulate 
conviction. The child does not raise the question 
how his parents got there, or what their functions 
are : he takes them for granted, and, if he lives 
his own life to some extent, he always calls upon 
them for what he wants. This closely resembles 
an early and undeveloped stage in religion. The 
resemblance is not exact ; there are many in- 
fluences which prevent any such simple relations ; 
but the definitely religious element, which underlies 
much that is only partly religious in undeveloped 
man, is similar to the inarticulate and unreasoned 
confidence of a child in its parents. 

Faith in God at an elementary stage such 
as this is largely emotional. It is not true to 
say that it is mere emotion, because it has in it 
the aptitude for becoming articulate and being 
made intelligible. The growing experience of 
life will give it form and definiteness and elaborate 
its real meaning and use. Here again the growth 
of the individual illustrates the growth of the 
race. The child who at first has no clear ideas of 
his proper relation to his parents finds out as his 
experience increases what it really means. If at 



FAITH 



11 



the early stages he has little more notion of his 
parents than as means to supply his wants and 
afford him protection, he soon comes to know 
something of their character. He notices their 
acts, and begins, sooner perhaps than they are 
aware, to criticise and judge them. Both sides 
will be perpetually revealing themselves, each to 
the other, and very different results may be 
attained ; the child may grow into a love and 
veneration which continually strengthens, though 
it never- really destroys his freedom and inde- 
pendence, or he may try his parents and find 
them wanting, and pursue his own life without 
any real help or guidance from them. 

There is, at first sight, no reason why the 
growth of religious faith should not follow the 
same simple lines as these ; it would seem natural 
that the wider experience of life should bring 
additional clearness and intelligence to man's 
faith in God, as it does to the child's faith in his 
parents. It is obvious that the blind and un- 
explained faith in God which belongs to the 
early stages of religion can be of no use when life 
itself has become difficult and complicated. 
Religion must have a meaning and a power 
in the life of civilised man as well as for the 
savage ; it must deal with his most complicated 
problems, and help his ideals in his circumstances 
as they change, or it will drop out of use and 
disappear or become a mere superstition. But 
the process of adapting religion to new and more 
difficult circumstances is not a simple and easy 
one, and this is due to two very important facts. 
In the first place, man's knowledge of God is 



12 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



not like the child's knowledge of his parents, 
part of his daily experience of the world : it is 
obtained by indirect methods. And secondly, 
between God and man there stands the fact of 
sin. We will consider these two points in the 
reverse order. 

Sin implies not merely the commission of 
certain acts which contravene the law of God : 
it covers also and involves a perverted attitude 
towards God in general. The root of it is self- 
assertion, the refusal to follow the guidance and 
obey the commands of God ; and it results in 
weakness of will — a man cannot do the things 
that he would — and spiritual blindness. The sin- 
ful man loses the power of seeing even what it is 
within the power of his nature to see ; his spiritual 
sense becomes dull, and the lust of the eyes, 
the desire of the flesh, and the pride of life take 
command over him. Man's development has been 
carried on under the shadow of this power. He 
has developed and advanced, but the whole 
process has been perverted by the presence of 
sin. Thus sin has never shown any sign of 
disappearing, however successful the advance in 
civilisation ; new steps in civilisation have rather 
given occasion for the appearance of new types 
of sin. And it is plain from the whole history of 
mankind that something more is necessary to 
get rid of this blighting influence than the 
machinery which he can devise for himself. This 
brings us in sight of the most difficult of all the 
questions connected with faith. Man cannot by 
his own wisdom or good deeds save himself from 
his sin. How, then, is he to be saved ? St. 



EAITH 



13 



Paul says by his faith. We must now ask, what 
does this mean, and how is it connected with 
the uses of the word "faith" which we have just 
been considering ? 

We have pointed out that sin not only involves 
a spirit of hostihty, a consciousness of broken law 
and of guilt, but it also blinds the spiritual sight, 
and prevents a man from becoming aware of the 
presence and love of God. On the other hand, 
faith, such as we have had in view above, expresses 
the spirit of sonship, it excludes hostihty, it 
sustains trial and proves true. If the sinner 
can pass from the state of sin, with all its con- 
sequences, into the condition of sonship, he is 
saved from his sin ; he has passed into the favour 
of God ; his faith, which is the proper expression 
of sonship, has saved him. But can he at will 
produce faith ? Can he simply change his 
attitude towards God, as he might change his 
attitude towards a neighbour with whom he had 
a quarrel, and come into Divine favour ? It 
is a hard saying, especially in modern ears, but 
the answer of the whole Bible to this question 
is an emphatic No. The efforts at moral im- 
provement in Western nations, the deep and 
intense aspirations of the saints of the Old Testa- 
ment, the experience of the Apostles in the New 
Testament, are all at one in this denial ; some- 
thing is wanted on God's side that will break 
down the barrier that holds man off from Him 
and make possible the faith that saves. 

We noticed that the knowledge of God differs 
from our knowledge of one another in being 
indirect ; we may extend this statement by 



14 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



pointing out that all certain knowledge of God, 
and every trustworthy step forward in our know- 
ledge of Him, is given to us by Him. Speculation 
— ^reflection upon nature and other such processes 
lead us to conclusions which we can never fully 
make good ; our real and trustworthy know- 
ledge of God comes by revelation. No doubt 
it is with God's will and under the leading of His 
Spirit that men feel after Him and find Him 
even in nature ; but there is a difference between 
this sort of knowledge and that we call definitely 
revealed, and it is convenient, therefore, to retain 
a different name. With this caution, it is true 
to say that the history of Revelation is the history 
of the Jewish religion. And the method pursued 
by God in making Himself known was to act in 
the field of history, and declare there His Power, 
His Holiness and at last His Love. The process 
is a long one. Man is not for many centuries 
able to respond to the higher calls and the fuller 
knowledge of God, and to produce the faith that 
saves ; he has to learn his own need as well as 
God's answer to it ; it is not until the fulness of 
the time that Christ comes. It was in the loving 
kindness of God that He delayed all those years ; 
it was out of His love for the world that He sent 
His Son. The long preparation had failed to 
carry all its meaning to the chosen nation ; they 
crucified Him Whom they should have welcomed ; 
but in this crucifixion the barrier which held man 
off from God was done away, and the path lay 
open to reconciliation and the sense of adoption. 
It is when man responds to this long revelation 
of loving care and trusts, though he cannot fully 



FAITH 



15 



explain, the efficacy of the Death of Christ, that 
he produces the faith which saves. He trusts 
no more in his own righteousness and his own 
efforts at reform, and he surrenders himself 
wholly to the power of God, and seeks for no 
other salvation. It may be that he still has to 
struggle against survivals of evil which come to 
him from his past, but by his surrender to the 
appeal of Christ's Cross he has in him the power 
which will carry him through all dangers and 
enable him to work out in detail all that his first 
surrender promises. 

Thus the faith in God, which is the climax of 
man's longing for God, appears as a true conscious- 
ness of sonship, and has, in spite of differences, 
many points of likeness to the faith of the child 
in his father. It is the fulfilment of the hope 
which has been astir in the mind of man wherever 
he has felt the presence of God in the world — the 
hope that he may build a bridge between himself 
and God, and enter into friendship Avith Him. 
That is the central meaning of faith, in religious 
language. To explain it in full would require 
a complete system of theology, and, at the least, 
would lead us into questions for which there is 
no room here. There are, however, one or two 
points which it is desirable to consider somewhat 
attentively before we leave the subject. 

It cannot be stated too strongly that true faith 
in God is always a response to an appeal from 
God, and never a result of pure speculation. It 
is very hard for men to believe this. As they 
develop in knowledge of the world, as they take 
a wider interest in human life, they cannot fail 



16 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



to feel increasingly competent to raise and to 
solve questions. The savage, who is terrified 
out of his wits by a thunderstorm or an eclipse, 
runs to his god to escape from a world that is 
too many for him. It is hard for the man who 
knows aU about thunderstorms and eclipses, who 
can bind to his service the strongest forces in 
nature, who can battle with disease, who can 
think out questions of science and economics 
and sociology — it is hard for such a man not to 
feel that he is equally competent to define what 
is and must be true of God. But the knowledge 
of God is not like the knowledge of a natural 
force or an economic law : it is the knowledge of 
a Person Whom we cannot see, and Who is known 
to us through His acts. These give us definite 
knowledge, but they also limit our knowledge, 
and we are dependent on them. And the way 
by which we interpret them is faith. The history 
of pure speculation in religious matters bears 
out this position. No speculative theory of the 
Being of God has ever succeeded in retaining a 
clear view of Him as a Person. We have learnt 
much from thinkers w^ho have given their minds 
to the problems at the root of religion ; and it 
cannot be denied that religion presents many 
difficulties to the mind. But the essence of 
religious activity is to hold communion with a 
Person — Whom we love, and Who loves us. We 
may not understand in full what we mean when 
we say these things of God : His nature is much 
more than an3^thing we can mean by " personal," 
but at least we know that He is not less than 
personal, that at least what we mean by 



FAITH 



17 



communion and love in our intercourse with men 
is true of the reHgious union between us and God. 
The notion of a remote First Cause — which is 
one of the results to which pure speculation is 
apt to lead — or that of an immanent power in- 
separable and indistinguishable from the world — 
which is another of such results — has no room for 
religious communion, and is at the opposite pole of 
thought to the faith which saves. It has lost the 
essential spring of religious life. 

Faith in the sense in which we have been 
considering it has many forms. It needs no 
learning to attain it ; like the love of a parent it 
is within the capacity of the simplest. But it 
does not necessarily stop at this level. It is, as 
we said, a surrender to the appeal of God, a 
realisation of sonship, a conviction of victory 
over sin in the strength of Christ. But it is a 
response to a revelation of Himself on the part 
of God, and this is a thing which has consequences. 
The more full the man's experience who has the 
faith, the more careful he is to study and reflect 
upon the acts in which the character of God is 
revealed, their history, and the method of God's 
government of the world, the more articulately 
he brings his faith into contact with all his life, 
so much the more will he desire or feel he has 
definite and trustworthy knowledge of God. He 
will not be content with inarticulate devotion, 
he will want to express his convictions and his 
knowledge about God in words. Within certain 
limits he can be sure that his expressions — if 
not fully adequate even to what he knows of 
God — are true. When faith is thus embodied in 

B 



18 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



language it is called a creed. There is no reason 
why a creed should not be both true and per- 
manent ; it will not, as we have said, express all 
that is true of God, but that does not mean that 
any other expressions, however incompatible with 
it, are equally true. To say that God is our 
Father does not say all that is true of Him, but 
it is true, and any proposition that is incompatible 
with this is not true. There is a real sense in 
which the word "faith" is used as interchangeable 
with creed. It is true, as we have said, that a 
sincere faith, even if it is inarticulate, saves the 
sinner ; but the faith which is also articulate 
and coherent is a more developed thing, and more 
fitly adapted to an advanced stage of human 
life. For our faith in Christ is meant to be a 
light to all our nature — to guide and give peace 
to our mind as well as our will and our spirit ; 
if we leave it to rule our feeling only and deny 
it the relief of the spoken word, we introduce a 
division into our nature, and leave a large part of ^ 
it outside the rule of Christ. ^ 

There are those, it is true, who pass beyond 
articulate language and even thought, and who 
have attained something like the heavenly vision. 
For them faith itself seems to have been tran- 
scended, and at times, at any rate, they seem to be 
free of the body and all its cumbrous methods. 
They are like the Apostles on the mount of Trans- 
figuration, they do not know what to say. But 
most of us have to live below the mount and mix i 
in the confusion of secular life ; and those will be 
happiest whose faith covers most ground, and who 
feel its force in every district of their life. 



II 



GOD 

" In God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." 

IN considering this greatest of all subjects, 
there are three inquiries which we shall 
make : 

(1) How did we get our belief in God ? 

(2) How is that belief justified to our intelli- 
gence ? 

(3) Can we know God by actual experience ? 

These questions will be found to cover suffi- 
ciently for our present purpose the vast discussions 
which, for many centuries, have occupied the minds 
of those who have grappled with the problem 
before us. 

We shall not lay down any definition at the 
start of what we mean by the great word " God." 
We shall let its meaning appear as we proceed. 

(1) Modern investigation of the thoughts and 
customs of primitive peoples has yielded much 
valuable material with which to supply an answer 
to our first question. The study of the origins of 
religion in all its forms, and the study of religions 
in relation to one another, have led to important 
results. Perhaps the most characteristic and uni- 
versal form of the primary religious impulse is the 
belief expressed by the mana of the Melanesians, 



20 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



or the orenda of the Hurons, a sacred mysterious 
potency in persons and things. To this mana is 
attributed in turn all forms of psychic energy, 
thought, memory, will, etc. From this root seem 
to spring the two main elements in primitive 
religion : (a) belief as regards the existence and 
influence of spirits, and (b) forms of ritual ob- 
servance. There is uncertainty as to which of 
these two emerges first : but, for our purpose, it 
is important to observe that, so far as we know, 
all primitive peoples are, or tend to be, animists ; 
that is, believers in the existence and operation of 
spiritual powers. Face to face with the world, 
confronted with a multitude of things which are 
in various degrees mysterious and intractable, the 
savage inevitably discerns the influence of spiritual 
agencies which, like himseK, are possessed of mind 
and will. 

It used to be thought that the savage is a 
materialist. It is now known that this is abso- 
lutely false. He is always a believer in a spirit- 
world. Behind the things that he sees and handles 
he believes in the presence and operation of unseen 
conscious agencies. Every notable feature of the 
world about him, every mountain, or river, or 
great tree ; every striking event or influence which 
affects his life, such as a storm, or a disease ; every 
difficulty or trouble which he encounters in his 
contact with the material world : all are connected 
in some undefined way with spiritual activities 
which he is somehow impelled to postulate. As 
savage thought advances these ideas assume 
clearer outlines, and there emerges belief in a vast 
multitude of nature-spirits. In addition, primitive 



^GOD 



21 



man lias, as a rule, a profound conviction as to the 
continued existence of the departed. He does not 
think that the end of the bodily life involves also 
the ending of the human spirit. 

Usually the spirits are regarded as malignant, 
or, at all events, jealous. They must be carefully 
remembered and considered. Their desires must 
be attended to. Their hostility must be guarded 
against. Hence follow all sorts of magical rites 
and observances which mimic the respect which 
is paid to important men. Also the terror of the 
spirit-world overshadows, like a black cloud, the 
whole of savage life. None can tell when some 
spirit who has been offended, by neglect or injury, 
may take vengeance for the affront. Life is beset 
with unseen perils.* 

It is easy to see that we have here the origin of 
pagan religions very clearly indicated. As thought 
rises to higher levels the world of petty, spiteful 
spirits is replaced by a hierarchy of nature-gods, 
terrible or beautiful, who are regarded as possessing 
superhuman powers, who are more or less interested 
in the doings of men, and of whom therefore account 
must be taken in human affairs. 

It has often been pointed out that underneath 
all polytheistic faiths may be detected a substratum 
of animism. And even so highly developed and 
philosophical a creed as Buddhism scarcely con- 
ceals the surviving animistic beliefs of the majority 
of its unlearned votaries. In Burma, for example, 
the most completely Buddhistic country in the 

* On the origins and nature of primitive religions see E. B. Tyler, 
Primitive Culture ; J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough ; R. R. Marett, The 
Threshold of Religion ; and the works of Jevons, Lang, Tiele, etc. 



22 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



world, the dominant religion is but a thin veil 
spread over the primitive animism. 

Out of this animism there arose those religions 
which impressed their character on such great 
peoples as those of ancient Egypt, of Greece, and 
of India ; religions which venerated gods of the 
sun and the moon, of earth and ocean, and which 
also recognised a pantheon of deities of various 
grades of importance and power. A wide survey 
of such creeds reveals the fact that any part or 
aspect of human experience, any department of 
life or quality of character, might come to be repre- 
sented by a corresponding deity. The tendency 
of man's mind in relation to this matter is to 
project himself and his experiences into the 
unseen, and to find there the counterpart of his 
own spiritual nature. 

We cannot therefore be surprised to find that 
the organisation of human society is reproduced 
among the gods ; and as kingly rule was estab- 
lished over great nations and territories it became 
inevitable that great sovereign deities should 
receive recognition. Thus Zeus, Jupiter, Odin 
emerged. Thus also we find national and tribal 
gods, such as Bel and Marduk; and in the city- 
states, whether monarchical or republican, deities 
who, like Athena at Athens, represented the genius 
of the community. 

Thus the passage from primitive animism to 
polytheistic forms of religion becomes easily intel- 
ligible ; and polytheism, let it be noted, is, on its 
own level, an eminently reasonable creed. The 
world is full of differences and oppositions, of 
conflicting agencies and influences : good and evil. 



GOD 



23 



light and darkness, pleasure and pain, health and 
disease, tribe warring with tribe, community 
competing with community. How natural for 
those who start with the animistic habit of mind 
to regard all these contending elements as the 
spheres of the activity of diverse spiritual agencies ! 
From this point of view monotheism is a very 
difficult creed. How can man believe in one sole, 
supreme universal Deity, when the world is so full 
of antagonisms, and there is no apparent over- 
ruling unity capable of bringing them all into har- 
mony ? Yet monotheism appeared, and achieved, 
within certain limits, a very wonderful victory. 
The Old Testament gives the record of its triumph. 
But it is not there only that we must seek for the 
history of monotheism. Greece, Persia, Clialdea, 
India, China, and Japan can all claim some share 
in this great revelation of supreme truth. In the 
great age of Greek thought there were minds which 
were able to rise to the conception of a Supreme 
One, a Being essentially One (i^opcfyr) ixCa) though 
expressed by " many names." Indian mono- 
theism, as recent investigations have disclosed, 
can be traced through a history of thousands of 
years.* In China and Japan, under the veil of 
Buddhism, Amida-worship has become the vehicle 
of a faith which is, in essence, a monotheistic 
creed. Amida, who is styled the true Buddha, is 
worshipped as the One Supreme Being, whose chief 
character is mercy, and who, through incarnation 
and sacrifice, accomplished man's salvation. Faith 
in him brings deliverance to the believer and secures 

* See Grierson, art. Bhakti-marga in Encyclopcedia of Religion and 
Ethics, and MacNicol, Indian Theism. 



24 THE MEANII^G OF THE CREED 



eternal happiness.* Yet it must be admitted that 
in all these cases monotheism is maintained with 
difficulty ; and in India and China there is a 
probability of Christian influence in the later 
developments. 

Only along the lines of that great spiritual 
progress recorded in the Old Testament can we 
find the true revelation and the definite triumph 
of monotheistic faith. Yet it was through hard 
struggle that victory came. In Israel there was, 
as in other ancient peoples, faith in a national God, 
a God Who stood for the genius and destiny of the 
nation. The history of Israel is the history of how 
the God of the nation came to be recognised as the 
God of the universe. It is the record of the final 
conflict of polytheism with the pure creed. In 
that conflict the prophets of Israel Avere the leaders. 
They it was who, above all, preached the true faith, 
denounced idolatry, and asserted the supremacy 
of Jehovah as the only God, over all things in 
heaven and earth, over nature and over history. 
(See e.g. Amos ix. 7 ; Isaiah ii. 5-22 ; xxxvii. 26-33, 
and in the later Isaiah, xl. 12 to end.) Out of the 
labours of the prophets as the interpreters of 
the experiences of the Hebrew race, and out of the 
terribly severe discipline through which that race 
passed, emerged an unshakable conviction in the 
great creed expressed by the words : " Hear, O 
Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." From 
Israel the monotheistic faith passed to Christianity 
and to Islam, and so became the possession of the 
modern world. 

There is, however, another side to this develop- 

* See Arthur Lloyd, The Creed of Half Japan. 



GOD 



25 



ment, and one which is equally important. There 
is a corresponding moral advance. Monotheism is 
essentially an ethical creed. Animism and poly- 
theism, with their recognition of the divinity of 
the diverse elements in the world, whether good 
or evil, can never attain to a high moral level. 
Pantheism is in a similar position. If good and 
evil are alike divine, why should one be preferred 
to the other ? In perfect accordance with this is 
the fact that, among pagan peoples, religion and 
morality are but loosely connected. Among the 
ancient Greeks and Romans morality was regarded 
as the cement of social life. Duty to the State 
made men become moral heroes. When morality 
sought justification it found it in philosoph}^ In 
the East to-day the higher morality springs out of 
Buddhism and other philosophic creeds. 

Monotheism unites religion with morality. So 
it was in the religion of Israel. So it must ever be, 
because if God is One, and supreme over the 
universe, His will and, on deeper reflection. His 
character, become the standard of personal life. 
And, with growing experience and clearer insight, 
the knowledge of God and the moral standard rise 
together. The human conscience, which in its 
beginnings is the mere apprehension that there is 
a distinction between good and evil, between right 
and wrong, gains enlightenment : it attains a larger 
grasp of the details and circumstances of life, 
marking out whole departments of conduct as 
good or evil : it acquires more and more a peculiar 
sensitiveness to moral differences, and, in the light 
of monotheistic faith, identifies all good with the 
whole meaning and plan of the universe, and 



26 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



turns from evil as that which is subversive of the 
universal purpose. It is monotheism which enables 
us to speak of conscience as the voice of God.* 

Thus it is that man has been led, throughout 
the course of human histor}/^, from the impulse 
which makes him suspect and fear some spiritual 
agency in every remarkable thing which he 
encounters in the world, up to that noble faith 
in the One Supreme Deity which has been the 
light of life to nearly all the greatest of human 
beings during the last two thousand years. 

A signal proof of the liberation and elevation 
which monotheism brings is found in an experience 
which is frequently enjoyed by Christian mission- 
aries. When to the animistic savage there finally 
comes, after many a hard struggle with his here- 
ditary ideas, the belief that God is one, holy, good, 
and supreme in the universe, there follows a glorious 
spiritual illumination. The terror of the evil spirits, 
that black cloud which overshadows savage life, 
vanishes : the man is able to look up with confi- 
dence to a Father in Heaven against Whose power 
no demon or magic spell can prevail. 

(2) We must now turn to the very important 
question. How is this monotheistic faith justified 
to the intelligence ? 

There are two classes of thinkers who dispute 
this creed. First, atheists deny the existence of 
God ; secondly, agnostics hold that the evidence 
given for it is so unsatisfactory and the difficulties 
it involves are so serious that they must pronounce 
a verdict of not proven." Some go further and 

* On the imperfection of Mahommedan Monotheism, see Jevons, 
Comparative Religion, pp. 133, 134. 



GOD 



27 



say that it cannot be proved, because all the ideas 
involved are seK-contradictory. 

It is not necessary to consider atheists sepa- 
rately, because the arguments on which they rely 
are the same as those which are urged by the 
agnostics. The Atheist draws a more definite 
inference, and therein weakens his position. He 
tries to prove a negative — a very difficult thing to 
do. The Agnostic's position is much stronger. 
He appeals to the difficulty of solving all the 
ultimate problems, the impossibility of finding 
adequate terms to express ultimate truths, the 
weakness of many of the arguments which have 
been employed in the past, and concludes that the 
problem of the universe is insoluble. We can only, 
he holds, have real knowledge in the limited sphere 
which has come under our observation and been 
subj ect to experiment. Beyond this all is uncertain. 

Four proofs were, in the past, mainly relied on 
to establish the doctrine of God's existence. The 
first appeals to the principle of causation. Every 
thing or event must have a cause. The universe, 
therefore, must have come from a great First 
Cause. It is now admitted that this proof is not 
sufficient, because the universe as a whole is not 
comparable with the things which it contains. Yet 
the argument is not valueless, because the material 
world is essentially changing, fugitive, in its nature ; 
and even modern science points to an end of all 
material process when, by dissipation of energy, 
all creative movement shall cease. But if the 
world be finite in time, what caused its beginning ? 

The second proof arguics from the wonderful 
adaptation of means to ends in nature, the 



28 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



structure of the human eye or hand, for example, so 
marvellously fitted for theh purpose. Instances of 
such adaptations are to be found in countless 
numbers. Surely they prove a designing mind. 
This argument, though acutety criticised by Kant 
and others, was regarded as of overwhelming force 
until Darwin's doctrine of the origin of species 
pointed to a natural process by which these 
wonderful adaptations may have come about. 
According to this doctrine the}^ are due to the slow 
adjustment of organism to environment through 
countless generations. It must be admitted that 
this new light of science changes the problem. 
But it does not destro}' the argument. Instead of 
considering particular instances we must now 
consider the whole evolutionar}^ process. When 
we do this we see a vast age-long procession and 
mark its direction. We see an order in which 
matter leads on to life, life to consciousness, con- 
sciousness to humanity, humanity to a highly- 
organised social existence in which loftj' moral 
ideals appear, and in which a glorious vision of a 
perfected humanity, a Kingdom of God, emerges. 
Here, in this highest point of the great series, w^e 
feel justified in discerning the meaning, the pm^pose 
of the whole. The design is revealed, and it is a 
design which seems clearly to show a great designer. 

The third proof is of a highly metaph3^sical 
character, and cannot be so easily outlined. But, 
even in this short paper, we hope to be able before 
concluding to bring out into some degree of clear- 
ness its essential nature. 

A fom'th ground of proof has been found in the 
moral natm^e of man. Conscience is the revelation 



GOD 



29 



of man's responsibility to some supreme authority. 
Against this can be urged those theories of the 
origin of moral distinctions which trace them to a 
purely natural source. We need not pause to 
discuss this question, for we have already seen how 
close is the connection between monotheistic faith 
and belief in the absolute and eternal nature of the 
good. 

All these proofs possess, as we have seen, a real 
value. Yet it must be confessed that none of 
them provides that rigorous certainty which is 
demanded in mathematical demonstration or in 
physical science. So clearly has this element of 
uncertainty been recognised that some thinkers, 
for example Bishop) Butler, have held that it is 
part of God's method of dealing with us to make 
the proofs of religion of such a nature that doubt 
is possible. Thus the intellect becomes a means 
of moral discipline. Man is put upon trial. He 
learns that he is responsible for the use of his 
intelligence. Every department of human life 
rests upon a moral basis. 

This last consideration opens the way for 
another presentation of the theistic problem. It 
will be found that there is an underlying reason in 
the whole process by which man attained to his 
belief in God. In his life on earth man is always 
feeling his way. He is like a creature moving over 
thin ice and finding, as it goes, how far the ice will 
bear. So it is in science. By observation and 
experiment results are attained. It is found, after 
repeated testing and verification, that there is a 
certain degree of constancy in natural processes. 
Fire melts lead to-day : it will do so to-morrow. 



30 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



You can depend upon fire to melt lead. Out of 
such observations the whole vast structure of 
science has arisen. And the more science advances 
the more certainly does it appear that there is an 
underlying trustworthiness in nature. The laws 
of Nature, which science discovers and codifies, 
are simply ways in which this constancy is ex- 
pressed. Further consideration shows that the 
principle which thus comes to light is fundamental 
in all knowledge, in all use of our faculties. What 
is true to-day will be true to-morrow. What 
human power can effect to-day, human power can 
effect to-morrow. What man has done man can do. 

Herbert Spencer, in setting forth the founda- 
tions of his agnostic creed, concludes his examina- 
tion of ultimate religious ideas with these words : 
" The Power which the universe manifests to us is 
utterly inscrutable." It is an obvious criticism 
that this is a contradiction. If the Power is mani- 
fested, how is it utterly inscrutable ? It is surely 
clear that so far as it is manifested it is not utterly 
inscrutable. More important still is the observa- 
tion that even the most extreme agnostic has to 
admit that the imiverse is the manifestation of 
some great power. This being so, it would seem 
to be more reasonable to endeavour to gather the 
character of that Power from the nature of the 
manifestation which takes place in the universe 
than to draw a universal conclusion of inscru- 
tability from the fact that there are difficulties 
involved in the ideas and terms which men have 
employed in old creeds and philosophies. It 
would certainly be more scientific. 

Does our experience warrant any conclusion 



GOD 



31 



as to the character of the Ultimate Power ? It 
certainly does. All our knowledge as well as the 
whole structure of our ordered life depend upon 
the principle that the Power which the universe 
manifests to us is trustworthy. And every advance 
in science is a further extension of the sphere of 
this trustworthiness. Further, the great progress 
which has taken place throughout the history of 
human thought in the formation of the conception 
of God has proceeded on lines which are exactly 
parallel to this scientific advance. The animistic 
savage regards the world as the scene of the opera- 
tion of diverse and unaccountable spiritual powers. 
For him the things and events of nature are capri- 
cious. He has no sense of order in the universe. 
As thought rises, certain deities of a higher and 
more consistent character seem to emerge and 
dominate the others. This is polytheism. With 
the appearance of monotheistic faith there comes 
the conception of the world as under one great 
supreme rule. Everything that happens must, 
on this view, however unaccountable it may seem, 
have some place in the will or purpose of the only 
God. Order has taken the place of disorder. 
Hence the wonderful liberation which comes to 
the animistic savage when he is suddenly lifted 
from the bottom to the top of the scale of religious 
ideas. He has learned to think of the universe as 
under one supreme rule, and that rule trustworthy. 
The truth is that man's religious consciousness 
has attained the goal more quickly than his 
scientific consciousness. By an act of faith the 
religious mind has already reached the conclusion 
towards which science is still painfully striving. 



32 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



When we have once gained the behef that the 
power which the universe manifests to us is trust- 
worthy we have all that is necessary to establish 
our theistic creed. We must apply the principle 
which has come to light not merely to the processes 
and events of the material world, but also to the 
facts of organic life and to the moral and social life 
of man. We must believe that not a sparrow falls 
to the ground without the care of the Supreme, 
that no human soul is " cast as rubbish to the 
void," that the very hairs of our head are num- 
bered, that moral values are no mere current coin 
of social existence, but are the human expression 
of values which in their final quality belong to the 
Eternal. Work out the principle of the trust- 
worthiness of the power which the universe mani- 
fests to us to the full, and it becomes that final 
summing up of all that Christianity teaches as to 
the nature of God : " God is Love." In the moral 
sphere the term " love " is the only complete 
expression of trustworthiness. Hence the strength 
of the appeal which Christ's teaching of the Father- 
hood of God has ever made to the human heart. 

It must be admitted that there is one serious 
difficulty in the way of the acceptance of this great 
conclusion. The world is full of evil. How can 
the existence of evil be reconciled with this belief 
in the Supreme Power as utterly trustworthy ? 
This is the problem which most of all presses upon 
thoughtful minds in our day, and the difficulty has 
been terribly accentuated by the horrors which 
have accompanied the present awful world- 
war. 

Two ways of dealing with this problem have 



GOD 



33 



been prominent in recent discussion. First, there 
are some who hold that the existence of evil proves 
that God is not, in the fullest sense, omnipotent. 
He is overcoming the evil, and will, we must 
believe, finally conquer it ; but, as things are now, 
the world is not altogether subject to Him. To 
this doctrine there is the objection that, if we 
suppose God's power limited in this way, we deny 
His supremacy, we admit an opposing power which, 
for all we can tell, may overcome Him and bring 
His work to nought. More fundamentally, we cease 
to regard Him as the Power Avhich the universe 
manifests to us, we admit another and opposing 
power manifested in the universe and therefore we 
shake the foundation on which our faith is built. 

A higher thought affords help here. May not 
the limitation of the Divine power be due, not to 
an opposing power standing in some sense on the 
same level of being, but to voluntary self-limita- 
tion ? The existence of finite beings, possessed of 
moral faculty, able to choose between good and 
evil, points to such self-limitation on the part of 
God. It would appear to be a condition of the 
very existence of a moral universe comprising a 
multitude of finite intelligences. This is the 
solution that has perhaps appealed most widely 
to thoughtful modern Christians. God desires 
children to love Him, not machines rendering a 
mechanical service. He has therefore created 
beings capable of good and also capable of evil, and 
to make this possible has limited, to some extent, 
the sphere of His own Divine power. But such 
limitation is not absolute. It is altogether relative 
to the accomplishment of His own supreme 

c 



34 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



purpose. That purpose is the final estabhshmeiit 
of the Kingdom of Love, through the victory of 
Love over all the oppositions of evil wills. Evil is 
therefore essentially subordinate. 

The second mode of dealing with the problem 
of evil enables us to gain a further view as to the 
nature of this subordination. It is admitted that, 
so far as we can see at present, the problem of evil 
is not fully soluble by our intelligence. May not 
this be a sign that our faith goes be3'0nd our 
thought ? We try to present to our minds the 
natiu:e of God by means of ideas and language 
which belong to our human experience, but these 
ideas, and the terms which express them, are not 
adequate. The nature of God cannot be fully 
expressed in human language. As He is the Power 
manifested in the universe, while we are but 
elements in His universe, we must be inferior to 
Him in the scale of being, and therefore we may 
expect to find difficulties, insoluble to our thought, 
standing in the way of our perfect apprehension of 
His nature. But here religion may find comfort 
in the experience of science. Science finds herseK 
constantty confronted with difficulties, but never 
for one moment does she lose hold of the principle 
of the constancy of Nature, and in that faith 
she conquers. So let it be with religion. She 
encounters problems more terrifjdng than those of 
science. For her also salvation must come through 
faith, that fundamental faith in the trustworthiness 
of the Supreme Power which is the ver}^ same as 
the faith in the constanc}^ of Natm^e which guides 
Science to her victories. 

It is worth our while to consider that there is a 



GOD 



35 



point of view to which we can attain by help of 
modern philosophy, from which, it would seem, 
we can behold all these various elements of thought 
in larger perspective. We saw that man's faith in 
God begins with his inevitable tendency to project 
his own conscious nature into the world about him, 
and to find a spiritual origin for the things and 
events which affect his life. Is there any reason- 
able foundation for that tendency or is it based on 
illusion ? It is important to observe that modern 
philosophy has yielded a method of regarding the 
universe which discloses a remarkable significance 
in the impulse of the savage mind to find spirit 
everywhere. 

What is spirit ? A spirit is a being who has 
experience. All things and events of which we are 
aware come to us as elements in our experience. 
To be a spirit is to be a being who is capable of 
grasping things and events within his experience. 
That is, a spirit is able to know, to feel, to think, 
to will. We may say that spirit is capacity in 
relation to experience. But it is more than 
capacity, it is also activity in relation to expe- 
rience, because in will and in attention, which 
is necessary for knowledge, spirit is active. But 
how does the w^orld exist at all ? There can be 
only one satisfactory answer to that question : the 
world exists as experience. All we know of the 
world, every sample we have of it, is experience. 
It can be nothing else. That is, all we know of 
the world exists only as contained within the 
capacity of some spirit. And not only so, but in 
every sample of the world, as it comes within our 
grasp, there is some degree of determination by 



36 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



the activity of spii'it, because attention and Avill 
determine very largely the shape which our 
experience takes. 

Now, surely we must believe that the world as 
it exists apart from our experience of it is the same 
sort of thing as it is in our experience. That rose, 
those trees, those hills, are the same whether I look 
at them or not. If that be so, it means that there 
is a universal experience in which the whole world 
of knowable things is included. And if so, there 
must be a capacity to grasp this universal expe- 
rience. Or, in other words, there is a universal 
spirit. The world exists because God is. Thus 
we grasp the fact that God is Universal Person- 
ality : He is the Self, Subject, or Person, to whom 
the whole universal order of things is relative. 

Having arrived at this conclusion, a fiu-ther 
question arises. What is the relation of the finite 
human spirit to God ? To answer this we must 
consider the relation of the finite experience to the 
world as a whole. One thing is clear. This ex- 
perience of mine is, somehow or other, a partial 
apprehension of that great universal experience — 
which I call the universe. Onty by assuming that 
the universe is an experience in which I have a 
share can I be assured that the rose which I see 
and touch and smell is a real thing existing, with its 
colour, texture and perfume, just as I know them, 
in a world of similar character. M}^ possession of 
conscious experience is ni}' share in the life of God. 
" In Him we live and move and have our being." 

God is the All-inclusive Life which comprehends 
all finite persons and their varjdng experiences. 
This must be so because every finite person has a 



GOD 



37 



share in His life. He must therefore be higher in 
the scale of being than any human person, for 
human personahty does not possess this capacity 
to include other persons within its life. In Him, 
therefore, we must conclude, personality reaches 
a degree of unity higher than any form of unity 
known to our thought, a unity which can compre- 
hend distinct persons within itself. 

We may put it thus : There are degrees of 
reality, life is higher in the scale than matter, 
personality is higher than mere vitality, God is 
highest of all. We cannot ascend to the highest 
point of view and solve all problems. 

This doctrine is quite opposed to pantheism. 
The latter identifies God and the universe : it 
regards the history of the universe as, in all its de- 
tails, the history of the life of God. The doctrine 
here set forth thinks of God as above the universe, 
as well as working in the universe. His is the life 
which makes the whole possible, yet all that hap- 
pens in that whole is not His work, just as a man's 
experience contains many things for which he is 
not responsible. Thus the problem of evil, how- 
ever perplexing to us, need not destroy our faith in 
the supremacy of God. 

(3) The final question that we set before our- 
selves in this paper is, Can man know God by actual 
experience ? The testimony of devout souls in 
all ages affirms the possibility. The great litera- 
tiu-e which discloses the thoughts and strivings of 
those who have diligently sought after God reveals 
the fact that such have ever been convinced that 
it was possible to find Him, and that in numberless 
cases they had actually enjoyed that supreme 



38 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



experience. The simplest illustration which can 
be given is the sense of presence which is attained 
in sincere prayer. The soul which shuts out the 
world and seeks God within is able to hold converse 
with the Unseen. The things of sense seem, for 
the time, to fall away, and the finite spirit meets the 
Infinite and feels Him to be the greatest of all 
realities. Is that illusion ? Surely not. If it be 
true that we share in the life of God, that in Him 
we live and move and have our being, then surely 
there is reason to think that we can become aware 
of the greater life enveloping our little life. Con- 
scious of. our own finiteness, we become aware 
of the Infinity of Being in which we dwell, and 
approaching that Being through the medium of 
spirit, and not through the medium of our limited 
abstract dealings with the material world, we feel 
His presence as the Personal Presence of One 
infinitely greater than we are, One Whose relation 
to us may be expressed by the great words : " The 
Eternal God is thy dwelling-place, and underneath 
are the everlasting arms." 

Note. — The spiritual philosophy sketched above is easily justified 
against Materialism, which regards matter as the only true reality ; for 
matter is known to us only through the medium of our consciousness. 
Also against Naturalism, which regards human life as a mere part of 
Nature ; because Nature is known through experience, and experience 
presupposes a conscious subject, or person. A doctrine of Realism 
which has recently appeared seems more dangerous. It holds that the 
world exists apart from spirit in the form of sensibles and universal s 
But how are these combined to form a whole ? In our experience, the 
combining agency is always that of a subject or person. 

For recent discussions of the philosophical questions raised above, 
see H. Rashdall, Philosophy and Religion, and his article in Personal 
Idealism ; C. C. J. Webb, Problems in the Relations of God and Man ; and 
the writer's God and Freedom in Human Experience. On the contro- 
versy with Naturahsm, see J. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, and 
A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, and Theism and Humanism. A. 
C. Fraser's Philosophy of Theism is very valuable. 



Ill 

THE MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 



" And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, who was conceived 
by the Holy Ghost." 

IT is unnecessary to insist on the supreme 
attraction of the character of our Lord as 
portrayed in the Gospels. It is felt by all, 
and there are few, even among those who do not 
accept the teaching of the Apostles concerning 
His divine Person, but wish, and to some extent 
try, to become like Him. If that attempt is 
made with anything like constancy it may be held 
to mark a man as a Christian, though not as a 
Churchman. He is, so far as the past can ever 
be repeated, in the position of the Galilaean dis- 
ciples before the Resurrection. But it may be 
doubted whether it is possible for any one to 
continue in such a position without development. 
It was not possible for those first disciples. Their 
love and admiration were connected with the 
thought of the Kingdom of God, and the relation 
of our Lord to it. His proclamation that the 
long- desired Kingdom was at hand had first 
drawn them to Him. In Him they saw, what 
had been looked for till then in vain, absolute 
fidelity to the pure ideal of that Kingdom. Here, 
in this positive form and not in the mere impos- 
sibility of catching Him in a fault, we perceive 



40 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



from the first the recognition of His perfect 
goodness. And from His lips, too, they heard 
an accent of authority different from any that 
had been heard before. " The time is fulfilled, 
and the kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye, 
and believe in the good tidings " (Mark i. 15) 
went beyond any message which the prophets had 
introduced with their "Thus saith the Lord." 
When the end of the ministry was approaching, 
and the Lord put the question, "Whom do men, 
whom do ye say that I am ? " St. Peter's answer 
brought to clear expression what was doubtless 
moving in the mind of others besides the Twelve. 
" Thou art the Christ," St. Peter said, and in 
that title at least one-half of what we mean by 
the Godhead of our Lord was implied. " The 
Christ " — ix. " the Anointed of the Lord " — 
had indeed been the designation of all the kings 
of Judali from Saul onwards. In 2 Sam. vii. it 
is explained as including the relationship of a son 
to God as Father. That might have degenerated 
into a simple metaphor. But in the actual 
course of Jewish faith quite the contrary took 
place. The post-exilic Jewish Church, reading 
in the books of Isaiah and Daniel the same great 
vision as we read, of One to come who was to be 
named " Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince 
of Peace " (Isaiah ix. 6), whose dominion was to 
be " an everlasting dominion, which shall not 
pass away, and his kingdom that which shall 
not be destroyed " (Daniel vii. 14), deepened 
their conception of the Messiah, the Christ, in the 
same direction as we have deepened it in Christian 
thought. When our Lord was born, a world of 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 41 



hopes were stirring Jewish minds of a Kingdom 
of God which would not be of this world, and of 
a Christ, the Son of God, the herald and prince of 
that Kingdom, Who should be recognised as divine. 

No doubt these hopes were various — not always 
purely spiritual. No doubt the term " divine " 
is more precise than the vague hopes of those 
preparatory days. What the disciples found in 
their Lord Jesus was a power, of a strangely 
unexpected kind, which brought unity and pre- 
cision into this variety and vagueness : "In 
Jesus Christ all contradictions are reconciled." 
We discern the process beginning in the early 
chapters of the Acts. It is St. Paul who brings it 
to full effect. He had not known Jesus of Nazareth 
in "the days of His flesh," and though he felt 
as all do the attraction of His character, that 
character was displayed to him in the Lord's 
death for the sake of men, and in the great act 
of God which set the seal to His Christship, the 
Eesurrection : He was " born of the seed of 
David according to the flesh, declared to be the 
Son of God witli power, according to the spirit 
of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead" 
(Romans i. 4). From this all the rest of St. 
Paul's large creed sprang : " God was in Christ 
reconciling the world unto himself : Him who 
knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf ; 
that we might become the righteousness of God 
in him" (2 Cor. v. 19, 21) ; Christ is " the image 
of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation ; 
for in him were all things created . . . He is 
before all things, and in him all things consist " 
(Col. i. 15-17) ; and St. Paul associates the name 



42 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



of Jesus Christ with the Father and the Spirit in a 
divine Trinity, " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
and the love of God, and the fellowship of the 
Holy Ghost, be with you all " (2 Cor. xiii. 14). 

In all this St. Paul was but following out the 
most advanced Jewish doctrine of his time, as he 
himself claimed according to Acts xxiv. 14 /. ; 
only, he believed the hope of his people to be 
realised in our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no 
infringement upon that doctrine of the " one God " 
on which the Jew so earnestly insisted. And 
we, too, must insist on that if we would think of 
the Incarnation as Holy Scripture directs us. 

Jesus the believer's God " is far from scriptural 
language. Even such a compound term as " the 
God- man" somewhat jars upon an ear attuned 
to the New Testament ; at least it must not be 
allowed to suggest either that in Jesus Christ 
apart from the Father we worship God, or that 
His manhood is different in kind from the man- 
hood of all men. The strong, one might almost 
say the daring, monotheism of St. Paul is remark- 
ably illustrated by his vision of " the end " in 
1 Cor. XV. 28 : And when all things have been 
subjected unto him, then shall the Son also 
himself be subjected unto him that did subject 
all things unto him, that God may be all in all." 
It would be hazardous to pretend to fathom the 
profundity of this. But St. Paul does appear 
to be inspired with some great idea of a time or 
state in which all such terms as Son," " Christ," 
" Trinity," must prove inadequate to picture the 
ultimate fulfilment of the rich unity of Godhead. 
Here St. Paul shows the masculine intellect 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 43 



with which he was endowed. But generally he 
dwells on the moral side of doctrine. To himself 
the revelation of Christ had come as an over- 
powering moral force. Shame, hope, love, trust, 
were wakened in him. He passed from moral 
impotence under the Law to a new life according 
to the Spirit of holiness. And this he knew to 
have been brought about by Christ's death and 
victory through death. This leads us first to 
notice the general truth — that the doctrine of 
the Incarnation makes its essential appeal to our 
moral sense. It is indeed a doctrine of inex- 
haustible interest to the intellect. Yet it msiy 
be grasped with little or no intellectual exercise 
by those to whom such exercise on sacred subjects 
is uncongenial. On the other hand, all dispute 
about it which is empty of moral interest is 
certain to go wrong. If we try to treat it as a 
purely intellectual matter, questions soon take 
a form which renders them unanswerable; they 
pass from the region of " reality " into that of 
appearance," like the questions, " Was there a 
beginning of time ? " " Is there a limit to space ? " 
This is in fact true of all spiritual " ideas. 
Sooner or later we are compelled to shape them 
in terms of moral goodness, else discourse becomes 
barren ; so, for instance, when we try to think 
out St. Paul's spiritual body." To this con- 
sideration we sliall return later. 

But besides this, the form which the revelation 
of Christ took for St. Paul brings another point 
to our notice which will again and again come 
up in all thought about the Incarnation. The 
truth as he saw it was not as he would have 



44 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



expected to see it ; the great fact was what we 
style paradoxical. His Jewish ancestors and 
teachers had been looking for the Christ. But 
it was a new thing to find the proof of Christship 
in a death of shame and apparent defeat. This 
is another point, yet it brings us quickly back to 
what we have just been considering. Christ's 
death was shameful as His ministry had been 
obscure. But reflection shows that we can conceive 
of no other way in which an equal moral grandeur 
could have been achieved. If " God was in 
Christ reconciling the world to himseh " — and 
that is the essence of the Incarnation — anything 
commonly accounted fame or success would have 
been a vulgar shift ; " sacrifice," the ideal of 
Christ's humility, stands alone among the acti- 
vities possible to man as absolutely akin to the 
divine love. 

In the prologue to the Gospel according to 
St. John the Incarnation is approached from 
another side. " In the beginning was the Word, 
and the Word was with God, and the Word was 
God . . . all things were made by him ... in 
him was life." Here is an idea which had been 
in the mind of Greek philosophers ; more lately, 
in the mind of some Jews also. God, Who in 
Himself would be beyond the reach of human 
comprehension, has made Himself manifest through 
His Word, by Whom creation has been wrought, 
and in Whom all created life has its being. " And 
the life was the light of men . . . There was 
the true light, even the light which lighteth 
every man, coming into the world." Here is 
a further thought. This Word is also to be 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 45 



recognised in man ; in his intellect, but still 
more in the faculty with which man is endowed 
of communion with the divine ; for here, too, 
the moral aspect chiefly interested even the 
philosophers of the Gentiles. And they, too, would 
partly understand the hope indicated in the last 
phrase, " coming into the world " ; for they 
too had vague aspirations which are seen, when 
once the idea has been defined, to be summed 
up in the thought of Incarnation. Yet from the 
actual fact of Incarnation, of God coming in the 
real nature of man, to dwell as a man among 
other men, and that in lowliness and obscurity, 
these thinkers would have shrunk. Again, as 
with St. Paul so with St. John, the thing expected 
was realised in an unexpected manner. " And 
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." 

That is what St. John most insists upon. 
Unlike St. Paul, he is filled with the recollections 
of our Lord's life as very man among men on 
earth. That was why he wrote his Gospel. In 
an actual history, the wonder of which arises, 
sacramentalty, out of its lowliness and simplicity, 
he finds the only way of really interpreting the 
vast idea of the Word Who was from the beginning 
with God and Who was and is God. 

And so the Word had breath, and wrought 

With human hands the creed of creeds 

In lovehness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought ; 

Which he may read that bmds the sheaf, 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave. 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 

In roarings round the coral reef ; 



46 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



or, as the Evangelist liimseK puts it : The Word 
dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory 
as of the only begotten from the Father, full of 
grace and truth." 

St. Paul, then, from the Jewish side carried 
on the first disciples' reverence for the great 
Master into the belief in Jesus as the Christ, the 
Son of God, associated with the Father in the 
unity of Godhead. St. John, wdth a wider 
approach, carried it on into the belief in Jesus as 
the Word of God Who is God. St. Paul's Qon- 
ception of the Incarnation might be summed up 
in the sentence, " God was in Cln-ist reconciling 
the Avorld to himself " ; St. John's in " The 
Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The 
passage from St. Paul is taken from an Epistle, 2 
Corinthians, which needs no critical defence. Even 
if it be allowed that the date and authorship of 
the Fourth Gospel present complicated questions — 
that is a fairer way to put it than to speak of 
difficulties " — still it must be insisted upon 
that the deeper modern criticism goes the more 
evident it becomes that behind all the apostolic 
writings there lies a popular and primitive tra- 
dition which enshrined a surprisingly high view 
of the Person of Christ. We can have little 
doubt that, first on the line of Jewish thought 
about the Christ, and soon after on the more 
universal line of thought about the Word, the 
primitive Church rose to belief in the Incarnation. 
St. Paul and St. John did not start that belief ; 
they guided it in more scrupulous reverence and 
reasonableness. Above all, they insist on its being 
realised practically and morally in our own daily life. 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 47 



Few, however, who read this paper are Hkely 
to feel the critical difficulties acutely. It is not 
impossible that some may feel another kind of 
difficulty. Perhaps it might be described as the 
difficulty of common sense. What is meant will 
be seen if such persons will compare together 
two passages from which quotations have already 
been made, Romans i. 1-7 and Colossians i. 13-20. 
They may say, The first of these passages T 
readily accept ; the second demands an assent 
of quite another kind. In Romans I seem to 
read of a man uniquely inspired, to whose life 
continued after death — the like of which I Avould 
fain hope for other men — God vouchsafed unique 
testimony ; in Colossians of One who is so 
absolutely divine that I cannot also recognise 
him as a man. I do not question the earliness, 
nor even the correctness of this belief. But it 
is so extraordinary, that I do hesitate to accept 
it whole-heartedly as my own." A fair, because 
a scriptural, answer would be this : The doctrine 
of the Incarnation does call for something more 
than our common sense. It demands our recogni- 
tion of something wonderful in life. But it is in 
all life, not separately in the Person of our Lord, 
that this wonderful element is to be recognised. 
The Godhead of our Lord is never represented in 
the New Testament as separating Him from us. 
It is because He is God that He can overpass the 
limits which divide person from person in ordinary 
experience. In Him life and love are deepened ; 
we live in Him and are joined together in Him. 
For himself, St. Paul expresses this effect of the 
Incarnation in Galatians ii. 20 : "I have been 



48 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



crucified with Christ ; yet I Hve ; and yet no 
longer I, but Christ Hveth in me." And though 
few would dare to say that they can as yet make 
this claim their own, it does describe the ideal to 
which each believer hopes he is progressing. Of 
the whole company of believers St. Paul continually 
asserts that they live " in Christ " ; the phrase is 
characteristic of him, and the thought runs through 
all his teaching, his rebukes, and his encouragement. 

Common sense " is apt to treat such sayings as 
forcible metaphors. But that recognition of a 
wonderful capacity in life, set free by the Incar- 
nation, reverses the position. This union in Christ 
Who lifts men to God by virtue of His own God- 
head is reality ; the separations of our imperfect 
intercourse in the flesh are the shadows. If ever 
heart does reach another heart in fine thought 
or great deed it is because common life has been 
lifted up through Him — " That life which I now 
live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is 
in the Son of God, who loved me and gave him- 
self up for me." Once more, as we noticed above 
and shall have to notice again, doctrine comes to 
effect in the spiritually moral region. Christ's 
love and sacrifice, our being crucified with Him ; 
these are the conditions which, on the one hand, 
were made possible by the Incarnation, and, on 
the other hand, it is when these conditions become 
the main interest of life that the Incarnation is 
experienced as effectual. 

In the Epistle to the Ephesians this idea of our 
living " in Christ " is worked out more distinctly. 
Here the ancient Jewish conception of the 
representative Christ — the Lord's Anointed Who 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 49 



represents or includes the whole nation (c/. e,g., 
Psalm Ixxxix. 51 ; Hebrews xi. 26) — is developed. 
" Christ " in this Epistle does of course mean the 
Lord Jesus. But it means more than " Jesus." 
It means Jesus exalted to the right hand of the 
Father, and now, in His Godhead enriched with 
manhood, gathering in, as part of Himself, all who 
follow and believe in Him. They are to grow with 
and in Him unto one " full-grown man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ " 
(iv. 13). The thought appears very remarkably 
in i. 23, which should be translated "... the 
church, which is his body, the fulness of him 
who is being all in all fulfilled " ; see the Dean 
of Wells' Exposition of the Epistle, a small book 
in which this apostolic doctrine may be almost 
said to have been recovered for our generation. 
Not that it has ever been really lost. Tennyson's 
lines in In Memoriam, cvi, enshrine it : — 

Ring out, wild bells ... 

Ring in the valiant man and free, 

The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 

Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

So, according to the more generous interpretation 
of the clause, does the Athanasian Creed : '\ , , 
One Christ ; One ; not by conversion of the God- 
head into flesh : but by taking of the manhood 
into God." And when we adopt from Ephesians 
the designation of the Church as the body of 
Christ," we mean the same ; no mere metaphor, 
but a plain truth as real as it is wonderful. 
And by real " we must understand practical " 



50 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



— that is, as we have already observed, spiritually 
moraL 

The First Epistle of St. John is a treatise oii: 
the Church considered as the extension of the 
Incarnation. The opening verse gives the theo- 
logical theme ; the rest of the Epistle works it 
out in practical precepts about brotherly love. 
In the brethren we see the Incarnate Christ 
manifested. That is why Christian charity passes 
so far beyond common sense in this earliest manual 
of " Christian socialism " : " We know that we 
have passed out of death into life, because we love 
the brethren " (iii. 14) ; " Hereby know we love, 
because he laid down his life for us: and we 
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren " 
(iii. 16); "Herein is love made perfect with us 
. . . because as he is, even so are we in this 
world " (iv. 17). 

It should, however, be noticed that the term 
" Church " does not occur in this Epistle. The 
Church may be described as an extension of the 
Incarnation. But if the Incarnation does not 
extend also on other lines beside the line of the 
Church, at least it seems likely that, as the exten- 
sion proceeds, we must expect to see the Church 
gathering strength by interaction with much that 
is as yet outside the boundary. No doubt St. 
John meant by " the brethren " those who had 
been baptised and were living in the community 
of Christ. In his day the division between these 
and " the whole world lying in the evil one " was 
unmistakable. But the light which came into 
the world with the Incarnate Word " lighteth 
every man " (John i. 9). It would dull the keen 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 51 



edge of St, John's precepts for ourselves if we still 
considered the brothers whom he bids iis feed, 
clothe, love, and die for, as simply Churchmen. 
St. John insists on this love of the brethren being 
not " in word and with the tongue, but in deed 
and truth." In our modern way we should say 
that it must not be merely academic. Love has 
perhaps grown somewhat cold of late because we 
have become too academic. We try to plan a 
unity for the Church on the model of past 
centuries ; but can any unity be really spiritual 
which does not transform the present enmity of 
nations ? We have explained the sacraments, 
and with sincere reverence guarded the approach 
to the altar ; and still our communion in the Body 
and Blood of Christ hardly affects the divisions 
between wealth and poverty, labour and capital. 
And meanwhile the boundaries are being blurred. 
Men are passing to a closer following of Christ 
who are not Churchmen, and some are striving 
with new boldness of self-sacrifice to realise the 
meaning of " we who are many, are one bread, one 
body," without caring, as things are, to ^' partake 
of tiie one bread " (1 Cor. x. 16/.). 

It is not easy to set forth a definite remed}^ for 
such a state of things. But there is perhaps no 
need to propose rash remedies. As to St. Paul, 
when the quiet of his imprisonment succeeded 
to faithful labour in the midst of " fightings 
without, fears within," the idea of the one Church 
descended and harmonised his care of all the 
churches," so once again the idea of the one Church 
may be renewed, not by our anxious planning, but 
for us by God. Only, it is perhaps encouraging to 



52 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



remember that the light of the Incarnation prepares 
us for a manifold and unexpected development of 
the Church, and that the designation of the Church 
as " the body of Clu-ist " is employed in Ephesians 
less to imply visible boundary than living growth ; 
it is in closest connexion with the living and 
growing doctrine of the Incarnation. 

For growth, too, belongs to the doctrine. 
Christ exalted is still Christ incarnate, and the 
discourses and prayer in St. John's Gospel, xiii- 
xvii, promise that through the Holy Spirit the 
incarnate Word will continuously manifest Him- 
self in history, and thought, and in all that gradual 
deepening and harmonising of life by which we 
are being led onward out of blind enmities and 
selfish vanities into the rich effective fellowship 
of God's purpose for His creatures. That seems to 
be at least part of the significance of I am the 
w^ay, the truth, and the life." And, illustrated 
by the prologue to this Gospel, that saying of the 
Lord appears to reach even beyond the destiny 
of man, to (what St. Paul has also iust touched 
upon in Romans viii. 18-25) the destiny of all 
created life, of nature. Two realms of thought 
and feeling have been widely opened in the last 
half -century. One opening has been by the 
advance of natural science. The other has been 
thus described : " The religious perception of 
our time, in its widest and most practical appli- 
cation, is the consciousness that our well-being, 
both material and spiritual, individual and col- 
lective, temporal and eternal, lies in the growth 
of brotherhood among all men — in their loving 
harmony with one another " (Tolstoy, What is 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 53 



Art?). Both have been suspected as hostile to 
the strict faith. Already we have gone far to- 
wards perceiving that the suspicion was ground- 
less. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as we 
ponder upon it more thoughtfully, and apply it 
more practically, leads us to anticipate still 
broader and more fruitful reconciliations. Eras- 
mus wrote that " the Spirit of Christ flows forth 
more widely than our interpretations allow." We 
might speak in like manner of the Body of Christ, 
meaning that the hope which Erasmus threw out 
vaguely is capable of being worked out with 
precision in actual affairs. 

A possible objection to all this may occur. 
Some one may sa}^ : " You have taken some ideas 
which are very general just now, and you have 
fitted them into the doctrine of the Incarnation. 
But there is no logical necessity to do so. All 
that is valuable in these ideas may indeed depend 
upon the doctrine of the Word of God, but would 
remain equally available though the Word had 
never become flesh. The life of the Lord Jesus 
is in itself beautiful and grand. You have shown 
how it came to be connected with these other 
ideas. But I do not see why I should not believe 
in these ideas without connecting them in any 
special manner with that life." 

This objection overlaps the objection which 
was considered earlier in this paper, and the answer 
must be a development of the answer given there. 
But first, it may be admitted that minds are 
differently constituted, and that to some faith 
seems to be more stimulated by ideas than by 
persons. The doctrine of the Word, taken by 



54 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



itself, is nearer to an idea than to the devotion to 
a person. There seems, which to some is an 
attraction, more of the infinite in it. And just as 
it appeared allowable to recognise a degree of 
Christian faith in one who tried to follow the 
example of the Lord Jesus without accepting the 
deeper mystery of His Person, so, too, it may be 
that he whose heart is anchored in the Word 
enjoys a part of the Christian faith, even though 
his intellect is not much engaged by historical 
recollection of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet this faith 
is but elementary in either case ; its worth lies 
mainly in its promise of growth. And those will 
feel this most to be true who most feel the difficulty 
of bringing the two lines together — ^the definite 
concrete life of a particular man on earth and the 
ideal life of the eternal Word. For in this, as in 
all serious problems, the difficulty is the measure 
of the reality on which the problem turns. If 
that reality is absolute, the final solution alwa^^s 
remains beyond our reach. Yet, on the other 
hand, our associated efforts towards solution unite 
us in the love of truth, throw light on other per- 
plexities which beset our mortal condition, and 
assure us that the aspirations of manhood, though 
baffled, do run out into eternity. And indeed, 
when it is recognised that the term eternal " is 
not antithetical to " on earth " the difficulty begins 
to vanish. Eternal life, according to the teaching 
of our Lord, especially as that teaching is inter- 
preted in St. John, does not begin after death or 
in another world. Here and now we may be 
living eternal life. The new life on which we 
start and start again after each repentance is the 



MEANING OF THE INCAENATION 55 



eternal life. What shows our Lord lifted so high 
above all other men is that He needed not such 
repentances and always lived the eternal life 
without interruption. Then when this presence 
of eternity in earthly surroundings is recognised, 
that wonderful element of which we have already 
spoken grows larger and larger in all we have to 
do with, till it appears as the gleam of reality in 
things ; it is always on, in, and around us, Avhile 
the shadows that partly obscure it pass and 
change. But the very centre of all this wonderful 
life is the wonder of the Person of Jesus Christ, 
and — though we dare not say all — ^yet most of 
those who have learned to delight in this rich 
marvel of universal life do find an inexhaustible 
joy in entering ever more deeply into the mystery 
of Christ's Person. He must be there as a definite 
Person, a person in the manner in which we our- 
selves know personality, else interest flags ; for 
even those who most enjoy ideas do find mere 
ideas unsatisfying if they are long cut off from 
intercourse with persons, and it is hard to imagine 
any other way of tracing out the thought of 
Incarnation than by approaching it through the 
human manifestation of the incarnate Person. He 
must also not merely partake as we do in the 
eternal and universal ; He must possess it as His 
own. Else there is no problem of His Person at 
all, and therefore no key to the thousand kindred 
problems which certainly do face us day by day. 
How the two become one in Jesus Christ we never 
succeed in determining. But the search carries 
us ever nearer to all that we mean by naming Him, 
and few who have started upon the search would 



56 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



hesitate to confess that to give it up would be for 
them the impoverishing of all they care about. 

Yet an argument which reaches no conclusion 
is unsatisfactor^^ Is not the failure but another 
instance of what has been already noticed more 
than once in this paper, the mistake of trying to 
treat a spiritual and moral interest as an intellectual 
problem ? Not that the intellect has no part to 
play in the matter. To suppose that would be 
stupid ingratitude to the great thinkers avIio have, 
to the glory of God and the benefit of sincere 
souls, devoted then' faculties to the noblest of all 
studies, Christian philosophy. But these great 
men have never treated the subject as an intel- 
lectual problem pure and simple. So far as they 
have achieved their aim they have also recognised 
the moral element. Nor, of course, is a man's 
failure to appreciate the doctrine of the Incarnation 
generally to be accounted for by something wrong 
in his own moral character. Such cases are 
probabl}^ rare. What is meant is this. Most of 
us will do better if we come to the question from 
the side of our affections, our duties, and all 
that complex spirituality within us which we sum 
up in such terms as " heart," or " love of God." 
And as this paper has nearly reached its allotted 
length, the readiest way to proceed Avill be to take 
one or two illustrative examples. 

First, then, the actual life on earth, the par- 
ticular character of oiu: Lord Jesus Christ as really 
and truty a man, is proved b}^ our experience to 
be all-necessary for us to remember and reverence. 
For therein we have the onty revelation of God's 
character which is absolutely trustworthy. The 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 57 



Old Testament witnesses to a progressive revelation 
of God which may easily mislead if it is not 
completed by the Gospel. In fact, it has again 
and again misled good men and induced them to 
be cruel, to enforce religion by violence, and so on. 
Our several consciences may too readily be biased, 
as most of us know. And besides that, the best 
part of our conscience, public or private, has been 
shaped, to a degree no one can exactly measure, 
by the general acceptance for generations past of 
the standard of Christ. Yet even so, we are apt to 
fashion God in the image of our desires and 
prejudices. For the strange thing about the 
revelation of God in Jesus Christ is that it goes so 
contrary to what our fancy would have. An 
obscure career ; all done by love, nothing by 
omnipotence, and many seeming failures ; no 
gloom nor aloofness but much simplicity in 
happiness, as in the pleasure of quiet talk with 
chance comers ; no far-laid plans, but loving trust, 
and this trustfulness shown both to the Father 
in heaven and to men ; a very beautiful, austere, 
3^et kind and, so to say, " natural " treatment of 
sin and sinners, hardly ever wholly imitated by 
even the best of men ; final victory through 
tragic defeat : in short, sacrifice, the ideal of 
Christ's humility, sheer love. 

Again, this earthly life is what alone can rouse 
us to that romantic loyalty which is the beginning 
and the perfection of faith for many, and these 
often the noblest of the faithful, such as martyrs 
and missionaries. And if no touch of this loyalty 
be in our hearts our faith is almost sure to be- 
come dull and wearisome, sometimes to ourselves, 



58 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



sometimes to others. Of which kind of faith it 
may too accurately be affirmed that " that which 
is becoming old and waxeth aged is nigh unto 
vanishing away." 

And yet romantic loyalty " will sound but 
a meagre phrase to those who are at home in the 
New Testament. They will rather feel that it is 
only by virtue of the power derived from the life 
of Christ that we are enabled to live at the level 
of the Word. Only in Christ can we grip hold on 
the Word. The act of God, put out in the life 
of Christ on our behalf, is our sole qualification for 
living as the Word requires of us. Christ's histori- 
cal manifestation is the sacrificial and sacramental 
means by which we receive our adoption into 
the fellowship of the Word. Only through the 
Spirit, released by the saving work of Christ on 
the Cross, did the Apostles arrive, by spiritual 
experience, at the doctrine of the Word. Few 
can hope to arrive where they arrived except by 
travelling the same road. 

And, on the other hand, if no interest is taken 
in the Saviour's pre-existence, in all that which is 
implied in the sublime language of the Creed : 
" God of God, Light of Light, very God of very 
God . . . Who for us men, and for our salvation, 
came down from heaven," then we fall to such a 
low level as when we style our Lord the Founder 
of Christianity." It is a sad, cold title, and it 
leads to a sad cold estimate of our most holy 
faith. We think of it as having begun, a new 
and local thing, twenty centuries ago. And we 
cannot but feel the misgiving that this religion 
among the other religions will sooner or later go 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 59 



the way of all particular religions, passing and 
being succeeded by another. But happily there 
is no such word as " Christianity" in Holy Scripture. 
Holy Scripture is full of Christ, and Truth, and 
Love, and Life ; the eternal Person with His 
eternal attributes. There has never been a time 
or place where He was not. Nor has any religion, 
worthy of the name at all, been wholly without 
Him. Nor dares, nor desires, any one who believes 
in the eternal Word, and knows aught of the love 
of Christ, to claim that his own creed, rite, church, 
holds the whole of Christ, or is unaffected by 
shadows that are not Christ. 

Yet creed and rite and church are also divine. 
Not only through the things that are seen, but 
through the very imperfections of life here, we 
lay hold of the perfect and unchanging. Therein 
is the sacramental energy of life, which emanates 
from the supreme sacrament of the Incarnation 
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 

That thought, indeed, of the Incarnation as the 
supreme sacrament, the interpretation of the 
whole sacramental principle, runs through all we 
have been considering in this paper. In the 
Catechism we say that by this word " sacrament " 
we mean " an outward and visible sign of an 
inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained 
by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive 
the same, a.nd a pledge to assure us thereof." 
There the reference is to the two ritual sacraments 
of Baptism and Holy Communion, which our Lord 
ordained. But these were fitted for His purpose 
because they were not to be arbitrary observances, 
but a particular application of that unity and 



60 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



interfusion of the visible and the eternal with 
which God has enobled the whole of His creation. 
The Church sacraments were ordained by Christ ; 
all nature was created sacramental b}^- Him Who 
is the Word. So St. Paul says that " the invisible 
things of him since the creation of the world are 
clearty seen, being perceived through the things 
that are made, even his everlasting power and 
divinity " (Rom. i. 20) ; and St. John has the 
same principle in view when he sa3^s : " He that 
loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot 
love God whom he hath not seen " (1 John iv. 20). 
Keble's hjann, "There is a book who runs may 
read," is a popular exposition of the idea. Keble 
meant more than that the beauties of nature stir 
our minds with thoughts of God. He meant that 
these forms of natural life really are parts in the 
life of God, just as St. John meant that in the 
brother we realty do see God, and in our loving 
service to the brother we really do reach God. So, 
too, our Lord says in the parable, " The King 
shall answer and saj^ unto them. Verily I say 
unto you, inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these 
my brethren, even these least, je did it unto 
me " (Matt. xxv. 40). 

" Even these least " is important. The sacra- 
mental principle is not concerned with pretty 
fancies, ingenious analogies, or the impression 
made on the mind by pomp and grandeur. It is 
an extension of the scientific fact, that all plwsical 
life is one, into the reasonable assurance of faith 
that all life is one, that the natural is also divine. 
Hence the ver}^ limitations, and sometimes 
even the repulsive aspects of visible life are 



MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 61 



sacramentally manifestations and means of ap- 
proach to the eternal. And this becomes clearer 
still when we recognise that in the Incarnation 
of our Lord Jesus Christ the whole of this sacra- 
mental faculty of life is illuminated, consecrated, 
and assured. If the Incarnation is what we believe 
it to be, in it " the invisible things of God, even 
his everlasting power and divinity " are, in a 
measure which explains and includes all other 
partial manifestations, " perceived through the 
things that are made " — i.e. through all the 
antecedents, circumstances, and pregnant limita- 
tions of the life of Him whom we call our Lord, 
and Who lived as a man of a particular nation, 
at a particular time and place on earth. No 
mistaken reverence must induce us to widen the 
sphere in which He manifested Himself by cutting 
away such natural conditions as may appear to 
our private judgement unworthy of His greatness. 
To say, for instance, that He is " representative 
Man " must not involve denial that He is "a 
man." The mysterious and the essential cannot 
be dissociated from the individual in any person, 
least of all in Him who is most personal. Again, 
no quality in Him is more mysterious than 
His vast but ever simplifying intellect ; yet it 
would " overthrow the nature of a sacrament " 
to remove the mystery by supposing that He 
knew more than other men simply because He 
was God. 

All such refinements infringe upon the doctrine 
which the Church received from the Apostles — 
viz. that the Incarnate Christ is very God and 
also very Man, not a mixture of the two. He is 



62 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



not, as the Arians once feigned — whose mistaken 
reverence we repudiate in the " Nicene " Creed 
— a heavenlv Being, " bv so much less than 
God as He is more than man. We hold fast to 
the complementar}^ truths, both the Manhood 
and the Godhead, both the costly sympathy and 
the prerogative to save. And the seeming con- 
tradiction is resolved in the reasonable principle 
of the one, universal life divine, which in Hini 
first, and then proceeding from Him, links con- 
tinuously the visible and limited with the eternal 
and complete. 

The term " sacrament " has here been used 
in the broad sense which it often bore in the early 
Church. Of late it has been more often confined 
to a special significance, and some who read these 
paragraphs ma^^ complain of the \\Titer's perversity 
in diverting a cmTcnt word (which is moreover 
distinguished by peculiarly sacred associations) 
to unfamiliar meanings. He can onl\^ answer 
that no lesser word seemed adequate to the 
purpose ; that the doctrine of the Incarnation 
itself is continually educating us to recognise 
divinit}' and sanctity rather in inclusive power 
than in unique privilege; and that, if dissatisfac- 
tion is felt, he welcomes the opportunity of adding 
a reference to the fine essa}^ on " Sacraments " in 
Lux Mimdi, by Francis Paget, late Bishop of 
Oxford. 



IV 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 



" Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate." 

HE Christian religion is in an eminent sense 



1 an historical religion. It has its foundations 
in a revelation made to man, and a deliverance 
wrought for man, in a particular generation of 
mankind, through a life then lived upon earth, 
through events which then occurred and took 
their place among all the events of the time. 

This connection of our Faith with history we 
will now consider. It is a characteristic strikingly 
recognised in the Church's Creed. In successive 
clauses of its second paragraph we have a number 
of facts regarding Jesus Christ recited ; two of 
them — His Crucifixion when Pontius Pilate was 
governor of Judaea, and His burial — purely natural 
ones ; others — His Birth from a Virgin, His 
Resurrection and Ascension — having both a super- 
natural and a natural side, being such as are not 
comprehensible to the extent that facts falling 
within general human experience are, and yet are 
said to have happened at a definite moment of 
time, and became known through ordinary human 
channels. 

Both these kinds of facts mentioned in the 
Creed derive their significance from the conviction 




64 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



that is expressed about Him Whom they concern 
— that He is the Christ, the Son of God. The fact 
itself, for instance, that Jesus of Nazareth was 
crucified, could only be regarded, if He was but 
a very holy man and a great moral and spiritual 
teacher, as one of the most appalling crimes re- 
corded in human history, and the contemplation 
of it would sadden and depress us. But inter- 
preted in the light of what the Church believes 
about Him, it becomes the greatest proof of the 
love of God, the ground of man's hope of salvation, 
and therefore fitly holds a place in the Creed of 
Christendom, which is to the Church a song of 
triumph. 

We cannot, then, rightly view particular events, 
concerning Jesus Christ apart from our whole 
conception of Him, and this must be formed from 
all that we can gather as to what He showed Him- 
self to be. Even in the days of the Public Ministry 
of Jesus and in the years that immediately followed 
His Crucifixion faith in Him was a complex thing. 
It did not arise solely from witnessing His miracles, 
or from those " infallible proofs " that He had 
risen from the dead of which the author of the 
Acts speaks ; but, in addition to these, from the 
whole effect of His personality upon minds morally 
and spiritually in a condition to feel it, apart from 
which neither miracles which He performed, nor 
His own resurrection, ever sufficed, or could suffice, 
to create faith. 

It is, then, to the total impression, so to speak, 
which He made that we have in the first instance 
to turn, and we know what this was primarily from 
the writings of the New Testament. Questions 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 65 



as to the authorship and date of most of these 
writings have been, and some of them still are, 
much debated ; but with a view to the use now 
to be made of them, it is necessary only to assume 
conclusions on these points which have been very 
widely accepted both by men who, while adhering 
to the faith of the Church, have striven to weigh 
evidence impartially, and also by many other 
scholars occupying a more detached position. 

For our present purpose we may divide the 
writings of the New Testament into two classes — 
namely, the four Gospels, which directly treat of 
the subject of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, 
and all the remainder. The first of the latter in 
order of position gives some account of the begin- 
nings and early spread of the society of those who 
believed in Him ; the subject of the last is His 
present heavenly reign and the future complete 
triumph of His Kingdom. All the others are in 
the form of letters, most of them being addressed 
to particular communities of Christians, and 
dealing with questions of doctrine and practice 
which had in the several localities caused trouble 
or perplexity ; a few of them intended even 
originally for the believers, not in one place, but 
in different places, and approximating in character 
to homilies. 

It will be safe to say that, with the exception, 
at most, of two or three of the minor Epistles, the 
writings of the New Testament had all been com- 
posed by the end of the first or the beginning of 
the second century — i.e. within seventy or eighty 
years after the Crucifixion, and some of them as 
early as twenty-five years after that event. 

E 



66 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



It will be well, I think, that before we turn to 
the accounts given of Jesus Christ in the Gospels 
we should fix our thoughts for a few moments on 
the other half of the New Testament. To do so 
will prepare us for rightly appreciating the mean- 
ing of the Gospel-story. The existence and faith 
of the Church of Christ have ever been the strongest 
testimony to Jesus Christ. And here in these 
writings, though they do not contain many refer- 
ences to incidents in His life on earth, or recite 
many of His sayings, we have the testimony to 
Him of the Church of the first days. We have an 
irrefragable demonstration of the marvellous effect 
produced by the Ministry and Death and Resur- 
rection of Jesus, We are taken into the midst of 
that new and great movement which sprang from 
Him, and was inspired by the new hope which He 
imparted, and was ever drawing fresh strength 
from faith in Him. In the life which we can still 
feel throbbing in these documents, which we hold 
in oiu" hands, we have evidence not to be gainsaid 
of the power of Jesus Christ over men's hearts. 

It would be impossible within the limits of a 
short paper to indicate in the barest manner the 
contribution made in this respect severally by each 
of these writings. Let me single out for brief 
consideration certain of St. Paul's Epistles. There 
are four of these of which the authenticity was 
admitted by the school of critics which has gone 
furthest in combating traditional views of the New 
Testament and of early Christian history, and 
which is so almost universally now, on account of 
the unmistakable signs of genuineness in their 
tone and character. These Epistles are the two 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTOEY 67 



to the Corinthians, that to the Galatians, and that 
to the Romans. All these had been written before 
A.D. 57 at the latest. There are other of the 
Epistles attributed to him which from internal 
marks appear unquestionably to be his. I would 
name especially the Epistle to the Philippians, 
written four or five years after the four which 
have just been mentioned, v/hen he was a prisoner 
at Rome. 

These Epistles amply enable us to determine 
what St. Paul's own faith was, and what that 
Gospel was which he felt himself called to preach 
as widely as he could, and the basis on which they 
rested. His whole view of God's purposes and of 
the way of salvation for man had been transformed 
through arriving at the conviction that Jesus, Who 
had suffered upon the Cross, w^as the Christ, and 
that by this path He had entered into His glory. 
By continual reflection upon these facts fresh 
points in regard to their significance doubtless 
presented themselves to His mind. This had been 
the case before, and in all probability continued 
to be so after, he wrote the Epistles that I have 
named. But there is clear evidence in those 
Epistles themselves that the foundation of his 
belief and teaching, and in the most important 
respects their substance also, had remained the 
same throughout. In the Epistle to the Galatians 
and in the First Epistle to the Corinthians he 
appeals with the utmost confidence to what he 
had taught those addressed when he first came 
amongst them, as being identical with what 
he taught still. In the former he pronoimces 
anathema on those who should preach any other 



68 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Gospel (Gal. i. 8, 9). In the latter, at the beginning 
of his great argument on the Resurrection, he refers 
to what he had delivered to them concerning 
appearances of the Risen Christ. Not only so, but 
he states also that what he " delivered " he had 
himself " received " (1 Cor. xv. 1 ff,). It is note- 
worthy that, although the revelation to himself 
on the road to Damascus must have had peculiar 
weight with him, he gives the first place to that 
which he had " received " — namely, the testimony 
of the older apostles. For the time that he 
" received " it we must go back well-nigh to the 
beginning of the preaching of the Christian faith. 
His conversion took place not improbably within 
two or three years, and certainly not more than six 
years, after the Crucifixion. It is most likely that, 
while the appearance of Jesus Christ to himself 
was decisive in bringing about the great change in 
all his views, a preparation for it had already been 
going on for some time. He was bidden no longer 
to " kick against the goads " (Acts xxvi. 16). He 
had been brought into contact in a hostile manner 
with eminent disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem, and 
that which they said had, we may well suppose, 
made a deep impression upon him, energetically as 
he had striven in his own mind to resist it. At all 
events, immediately after his conversion he must 
have been instructed in the statements which 
the eye-witnesses were accustomed to make. St. 
Paul's testimony, then, to the Gospel history, so 
far as it is given, affords a strong link with that of 
the first days. 

Moreover, the connection is of a broader kind 
than at first sight appears. It is true that the 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 69 



momentousness of two outstanding facts — the 
Crucifixion and the Resurrection of the Son of 
God — seems for St. Paul's mind to have over- 
shadowed all else in that history. Yet it should 
be observed that the reality of the death of Jesus, 
in which he plainly believed, involved his true 
humanity ; and, further, in what has been often 
said as to his indifference to the earthly life of 
J esus there is plainly, to say the least, a great deal 
of exaggeration. It is not conceivable that one 
who held up the example of Jesus Christ in that 
though He was rich, yet for your sakes He 
became poor " (2 Cor. viii. 9), and who marked 
the successive steps in His humiliation of Himself, 
noting first that " He took the form of a servant, 
being made in the likeness of men " (Phil. ii. 7, 8), 
should not have dwelt at times in his own thoughts 
and in his preaching on particular incidents or 
features of His life on earth, which illustrated the 
general conception ; or that he should not have 
sought to learn, and have communicated to others, 
sayings of the Lord, with the spirit of Whose ethical 
teaching, as it has been preserved for us in the 
Gospels, his own is in such striking accord. 

But great as is the value of this comparatively 
indirect evidence of the influence of Jesus, we turn 
with even deeper interest to the professed records 
of His life, and ask whether we may regard them 
as trustworthy. It was primarily the duty com- 
mitted to that chosen body of twelve disciples, who 
were specially close attendants upon Jesus during 
His Ministry on earth, to relate His deeds and His 
words, as well as to bear witness to His appear- 
ances to them after He had risen from the dead. 



70 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



It is clear that for many years they gave this 
information and testimony orally, and it was not 
(it would seem) till some of the chief among them 
had passed away by a martyr's death, or otherwise, 
that the need began to be urgently felt in the 
Church for permanent records of what they had 
delivered. The earliest of these records which 
has come down to us, as few doubt who have 
studied the subject, is our Gospel according to St. 
Mark. We may with great probability assign its 
composition to a.d. 65, or some year not much 
later than this — to a time not much after the 
martyrdom, in the Neronian persecution at Rome, 
of St. Peter, whose follower and helper in the work 
of evangelisation St. Mark was. According to a 
very early statement quoted by the Church his- 
torian, Eusebius, Mark made it his aim to give a 
faithful account of what Peter had been accus- 
tomed to deliver in his preaching. But while we 
may believe St. Peter to have been his principal 
source of information, he must have known, and 
Avould naturally not have refrained from making 
use of, what other original disciples of the Lord had 
related. The great value for us, then, of this Gospel 
consists in the fact that, as there is good reason to 
think, it follows the general outline, and embodies 
the substance, of the teaching which some of the 
chief personal followers of Jesus during His Public 
Ministry were accustomed to give concerning His 
life and death, in response to the demand which, 
as they went about on their missionary work, was 
made of them for information about Him Whom 
they declared to be the Christ and to have risen 
from the dead. 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 71 

The Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. 
Luke were probably written some few years after 
St. Mark, of which each appears to make use. But 
they also, besides much that is of great interest 
which is peculiar to each, contain matter derived 
from some common source, which was mainly, it 
would seem, a collection of the sayings and dis- 
courses of Jesus. The same authority from whom 
we learn St. Mark's dependence upon St. Peter 
tells us that the Apostle Matthew drew up an 
account of the Lord's teaching in the Hebrew 
language. From it that common matter to which 
I have referred in our First and Third Gospels is 
probably derived. We may well suppose that it 
may be somewhat more fully reproduced in our 
Greek Gospel according to St. Matthew than else- 
where, and that for this reason his name has been 
specially connected with that Gospel. 

Both this document, which specially recorded 
our Lord's teaching, and our St. Mark, or a briefer 
form of that work, may be among the writings 
referred to by St. Luke at the beginning of his 
Gospel ; and he probably had others in mind also, 
since he says that many had undertaken to draw 
up such accounts. In many respects they must 
have resembled each other, since they were all 
based upon the testimony of those who " from the 
beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the 
word." Some would be more, some less, full ; but 
there is good reason to feel confident that the 
substance of them all is contained in our first three 
(so-called Synoptic) Gospels. 

The composition of our Fourth Gospel must be 
placed near the end of that period of seventy or 



72 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



eighty years after the Crucifixion, within which, as 
I said above, if not quite all the writings of the 
New Testament, at least all the chief and most of 
the lesser of them were produced. This Gospel is 
the fruit of deep meditation upon the Person and 
Work of Christ, and in it the evangelist strives to 
represent to his readers the inner mind of Christ, 
and the full purport of His claims upon the faith 
of men. The questions of its authorship, and of 
the relation between its account of the life and 
teaching of Jesus Christ and that in the first three 
Gospels, are difficult, and a solution of them which 
commands wide assent has not yet been attained. 
But there is, to say the least, far deeper inner 
agreement between the view given us in this 
Gospel of the Person and Mission of Jesus Christ 
and that in the other three than is apparent at 
first sight, or than many critics have been, or even 
now are, willing to allow. 

So far as to the sources of the Gospel history : 
one or two points only in that history, broadly 
viewed, can be touched on here. 

Our Lord's own course of conduct in His 
Ministry among men, the hopes He raised, the 
questions asked about Him, the perplexities He 
caused, were all more or less closely connected with 
the expectation among the Jews of His time, 
implanted in their minds through their previous 
history and the teaching of the Old Testament 
prophets, and stimulated afresh by the Apocalyptic 
literature of later generations, that one should be 
sent to them from God — His Messiah — (or Christ) — 
Who should deliver Israel from sin and bondage, 
and that the Kingdom of God should be established 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 73 



upon earth. Jesus plainly implied that He had 
come to fulfil this Hope ; and yet, in the very act 
of holding out the promise that He would do so, 
He stripped it of its national limitations, and set 
before the minds of all who had spiritual discern- 
ment an entirely new conception of what is truly 
great upon earth. In order to work out redemption 
for men He Himself trod the path of self-abnega- 
tion and suffering. At the same time He exalted 
immeasurably the idea of the character and com- 
pleteness of that redemption which He would 
accomplish. And He asserted that He had perfect 
knowledge of the Father's Will through a com- 
munion with Him which was absolutely unique. 
In spite of the lowliness of His life and " sweet 
reasonableness " of His general demeanour, He 
made claims for Himself which were tremendous. 
And yet there are none of the ordinary signs of 
fanaticism in His manner of making them. Indeed, 
we have a guarantee of the truth of what He de- 
clared, or led men to believe, about HimseK in the 
marvellous insight which He showed into human 
character, and that thoroughness in the moral life 
and faultless sincerity in conduct and thought and 
motive, which He demanded. Such knowledge of 
others would be impossible without the fullest seK- 
knowledge ; and such a standard could not be set 
before others by one whose own motives were not 
perfectly pure. 

A few words must be said with regard to the 
miraculous element in the Gospel-history. There 
are, first of all, the wonderful works which Jesus 
is recorded to have performed. We cannot here 
inquire whether, as was maintained by Christian 



74 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Fathers and as has been held by many thoughtful 
theologians in modern times, the miracles of our 
Lord were (so to speak) a natiu-al outflow from His 
Incarnate life. Nor can we examine indications 
in the Gospels of His own consciousness in respect 
to the power by which He worked them. We must 
be content to mark the place they occupied in 
His Ministry. Further, we can view them only 
collectiveh', but for our present object this will 
be most useful, while difficulties that ma}^ be felt 
about particular works thus become relatively of 
less importance. 

If we consider the miracles of Jesus from the 
point of view of the Messianic expectation which 
prevailed, we cannot fail to see that they had a 
most intimate connection with the proclamation 
through His preaching of the Coming of the 
Kingdom of God. They were a revelation of God's 
redeeming purpose ; the}^ compelled men to ask 
whether the time when there should be no more 
sorrow had not come, and whether this was not 
the promised Deliverer. In so doing they plainty 
served an important end in relation to His Mission. 
And while in themselves they afforded relief only 
for a time to a limited number of sufferers m that 
generation, they were a foretaste and pledge of 
that victory which should ultimately be won over 
pain and death. 

Of a different order from the miracles which 
Jesus Himself performed are those of His birth 
from a Virgin and His resurrection. The evidence 
for the latter, which has been in part incidentally 
referred to above, will be more fully considered 
in another paper of this series. One or two 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTOEY 75 



remarks must be made on the evidence for the 
former. 

The absence of any express mention of, or 
unquestionable allusion to, the Virgin birth else- 
where in the New Testament than in the opening 
narratives of St. Matthew and St. Luke has been 
a ground for questioning its truth. But there are 
considerations which go some way at least towards 
supptying a satisfactory explanation of this com- 
parative silence. There Avas an outline of facts, 
which it was customary* to relate in the early 
preaching of the Gospel. It began from " the 
baptism which John preached " and passed from 
this to the public ministry of Jesus (Acts i. 22 ; 
X. 37 &, ; xiii. 23 ff.). We can see more than one 
reason for this point of departure having been 
chosen. The period covered fell within the per- 
sonal knowledge of the twelve. In appealing also 
to Jews it was a most impressive introduction to 
the Gospel-history, that the work of the Baptist 
should be placed in the forefront as ushering in 
that of Jesus. It was natural also that for some 
time reserve should be practised on the subject of 
the miraculous conception. It was a mystery too 
sacred, and too capable of misrepresentation, to 
be at once publicly proclaimed. It was well that 
even converts should be instructed first in other 
parts of the Faith, and so prepared to place this 
article in due course in its right position. 

The limits of St. Mark's Gospel were determined 
by those which had been usually observed in the 
oral teaching of the Gospel. Even in the Fourth 
Gospel there may be a trace of the influence of the 
old habit in oral narration, in the fact that a 



76 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



reference to the testimony of the Baptist to Jesus 
is woven into the Prologue, and that the first 
scenes described are connected with him. The 
most noteworthy point, however, to be observed 
in regard to the beginning of this Gospel, is that 
while the subject of the Eternal Being and Life of 
the Son of God, and the fact that He truly became 
Man, and lived as a man among men, are here 
dwelt upon, nothing is said as to the manner in 
which He took it. But there is no reason to think 
that the evangelist was therefore indifferent to 
what is related concerning the Birth of Jesus in 
our First and Third Gospels, with whose narratives 
he was in all probability^ acquainted. His mode 
of treatment in the present instance agrees with 
the characteristics of this Gospel generally, in 
which attention is directed rather to the great 
spiritual truths lying behind facts of history than 
to those facts themselves. 

The differences between St. Matthew and St. 
Luke in their opening chapters are familiar to all 
readers of the Bible. It has often been pointed 
out that the former appears more especially to 
give the experiences of Joseph, and the latter of 
the Blessed Virgin. The sources from which the 
two Evangelists drew their information were plainly 
independent. It may well be urged that for this 
reason the two accounts confirm each other in 
regard to the main point in which they coincide, 
the miraculous manner of the Saviour's birth. 

It is pre-eminently true of this article of the 
Christian Creed that our estimate of the evidence 
for it will be affected by what, quite apart from it, 
we believe as to the Person of Jesus Christ. If on 



JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 77 



broader grounds we are convinced of His true 
Divinity, there will seem to be a fitness in the 
mode of His incarnation having been supernatural, 
even though He truly united human nature to 
Himself, and placed Himself completely under 
human conditions in His life on earth. 

The consideration applied in this instance leads 
on to a final observation with regard to belief in 
the miraculous element in the Gospel-history 
generally, or any portion of it. Those laws of 
Nature, as we are wont to call them, which have 
been formulated through the careful study of 
Nature, should be sacred in our eyes, for they 
represent the usual method of God's working. But 
it can never be said that they must cover all cases 
which may have arisen, or which may hereafter 
arise. The reasoning by which they have been 
arrived at, based as it is on a range of experience 
which is inevitably limited, cannot prove such 
necessary universality. The strength of the tes- 
timony, whatever it may be, for any alleged 
exceptions has therefore to be taken into account. 
But there are still considerations of another kind 
which may justly have weight with us — namely, 
those as to the ends which any particular miracle 
may appear to have served in the purposes of 
God ; and in judging of these the mind cannot 
but be influenced by its whole attitude with regard 
to things spiritual. Indeed, for the genuine Theist 
the question of the credibility of miracles, to what- 
ever conclusion he is led, will be essentially a 
religious one : that is to say, he will interpret the 
evidence in the light of all that he can learn 
concerning the Divine Government of the world, 



78 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



through a right understanding of Nature and of 
History, and of what appears to have been required 
for carrying out the Divine plan for man's Re- 
demption. 

This short paper has been concerned with facts 
of history which happened long ago, and the 
sources of our knowledge of them. But let us not 
leave this subject without calling to mind how 
the present is connected with that distant past 
through that marvellous influence of Jesus which 
has extended through the centuries since, and 
reaches even unto us. This has to be taken into 
account if we would attempt to measure, however 
inadequately, the place of Jesus Christ in history. 
Far as even His professed followers in general have 
been, and are, from conforming themselves to His 
teaching, human thought and institutions have 
been profoundly affected by it, and human ideals 
of what is truly good and noble have been largely 
moulded upon it, wherever He has become known. 
Above all, to innumerable multitudes in everv 
generation He has been, as He still is, an object of 
personal loyalty and devotion in a manner that is 
absolutely unique. Love in other cases is confined 
to those whom we have known in the flesh. We 
admire the great ones of former ages ; we feel an 
interest in anything that Ave can learn about our 
own ancestors ; we can say about one and another, 
of whom we have read or heard, that we are sm^e we 
should have liked or loved them if we had lived 
with them. That is all. But Jesus Cln-ist is still 
loved and trusted and adored as a living Friend 
and Saviour and King. 



V 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 

"Was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell." 

BEFORE we come to the interpretation of 
this article of the Creed, it is worth while 
to call attention again to what is set forth 
in the paper immediately preceding this one, the 
fact of the historical character of Christianity. 
The Church, as a teaching body, has always put 
the facts about Christ first, and based her theology 
upon them. She knows nothiag of a theology or 
mysticism which is independent of definite, 
historical, concrete facts. The mention of Pontius 
Pilate was not due to a desire to pillory him as 
an exceptionally great criminal (he was not so 
regarded), but was intended to emphasise the 
reality of the Lord's suffering and death. 

The words suffered," " dead," are not found 
in the oldest form of the Creed. Their intro- 
duction emphasised the fact of the reality of what 
took place on the Cross. Christ, though He was 
the Son of God, submitted Himself to actual 
suffering and to what St. Paul calls the last 
enemy " — death. The word " buried " deserves 
special notice, as we should hardly have expected 
its inclusion. What is its special importance 
that it should gain a place in a short Creed ? 



80 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 

Once more, the desire to insist on the historic 
reality of everything connected with the Passion 
is seen at work, as against those who taught that 
there was no real body of the Lord, and therefore 
no real death or burial, or that the Son of God 
left a merely human Jesus to die on the Cross, 
and Himself returned to the heaven whence He 
had descended upon the man Jesus at the moment 
of His baptism. The Creed will have none of 
such speculations. It is Jesus Christ the only 
Son of God Who died and was buried. But 
further, the word " buried " looks forward to the 
next article on the Resurrection precisely as it 
does in 1 Corinthians xv. 4, where St. Paul says 
that his "Gospel" contains the facts that Christ 
was buried, and rose again the third day. For 
St. Paul and for the Creed it is the Person Who 
was buried Who rose again. It is no mere con- 
tinued existence after death, no return as of a 
ghost from another world. We do not speak of 
the bm?ial of the soul, or the resurrection of the 
soul, but of the w^hole person who has been laid 
in the grave. It is evident that both St. Paul 
and the Creed hold and teach the belief in the 
empty tomb, that the Person laid there on Good 
Friday was not to be found there on Easter Day, 
and the word " buried " removes all possible 
doubt of their meaning. 

Finally, the clause " He descended into hell " 
we find first in the Creed as it was recited in a 
little town in North Italy — Aquileia — in the fourth 
century a.d. But what it teaches is the teaching 
of quite early Christian writers, and of the First 
Epistle of St. Peter, who speaks of Christ as, after 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 81 



His Crucifixion, preaching to the spirits in prison. 
Moreover, it has the sanction of our Lord's word 
to the penitent thief, To-day shalt thou be with 
Me in Paradise " — for Paradise is not Heaven, 
just as Hell in the Creed is not Gehenna, the place 
of torment, but the abode of departed souls, which 
is what the Greek word Hades means. Of the 
importance of this clause something will be said 
later ; here let it suffice to point out that once 
again the Creed assures us that the Lord after His 
death went where man must go, and experienced 
in His human soul, which by death had been 
separated from His body, what man must experi- 
ence. 

We have seen that this article of the Creed not 
only puts before us the Lord's Passion as some- 
thing which we must, each individually, believe 
in, but insists on the historical reality of the 
Passion and of all that the Passion involved. 
Now we must go a step further and ask : " Why 
has the death of Christ a place in the Creed at 
all ? " Why is it important to believe that He 
was crucified and died ? For it is exceedingly 
interesting to observe that in the Creed no single 
event in our Lord's life, between His birth and 
His death, finds a place. There is not a word 
about His teaching or His miracles, and yet we 
know very well that both teaching and miracles 
were highly prized by Christians. Why then, 
after confessing our belief in His birth, are Ave not 
told to express our belief in any of His words and 
works, but only in His death ? 

Before we can answer this question satis- 
factorily we must go back to the very beginnings 



82 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



of the work of the Christian Church. We must 
fix in our minds, and turn over and over again in 
our minds, the great thought which the first 
apostles and disciples could never forget : Jesus 
had died — and He was the Messiah, that is, the 
Anointed One, in Greek the Christ. Remember 
what that meant. He to whom the Old Testa- 
ment, the Bible of those Christians, pointed 
forward, had come. And instead of reigning in 
triumph, instead of openly and undeniably bringing 
into existence a glorious new state of things, He 
had been crucified and had died. True, He had 
risen again, but that did not in itself explain the 
death ; neither death nor resurrection was 
expected of the Messiah. Why had He died at 
all ? There must be some great meaning in that 
fact. Moreover, the death of Jesus was, as St. 
Paul was to call it, a stumbling-block, an offence, 
to those who stood outside the Christian com- 
munity. Jews, from the first, taunted the disciples 
with the death of Jesus ; He had been crucified — 
how could He possibly be the Messiah ? And 
Gentiles were soon to mock at the folly of the idea 
that One who had been put to death as a criminal 
could be Saviour, Redeemer, Son of God. Clearly, 
the death of Jesus was a fact of the first import- 
ance ; Jews and Gentiles laid stress on it in their 
attacks upon the Church, in order to discredit 
Jesus ; on the other hand, if Jesus was what the 
Church believed, why had He died, and died in 
this way ? 

The New Testament is full of what we may call 
the Christian case on this matter. But before we 
say anything more, one very obvious but very 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 



83 



remarkable fact must be noticed. In the New 
Testament the death of Christ, the Cross of Christ, 
is not at all spoken of as though it were an 
inconvenient fact which had to be defended or 
almost explained away, as though it Avere the 
Aveak point in the Gospel which the Clnistian 
missionaries began to preach in the world. Above 
all, it is not something to be hidden away, but 
something to be proclaimed and gloried in. In 
other words, the Church did not for a moment 
allow that Jews and Gentiles possessed a strong 
a^rgument against Christianity in the fact that 
Jesus had been crucified, for one does not put into 
the forefront of one's teaching something which 
is felt to favour one's opponents. The deepest and 
most lasting note in the great chord of the Cross, 
as it echoes through the New Testament, is the 
note of triumph. Our inquiries must start from 
an acknowledgment of that fact. 

Let us return to the thought — the Church 
from the very first looked on Jesus as the Messiah. 
What was it expected that the Messiah w^ould 
be ? Among other things, and not the least 
important. He was to be the Deliverer, the Saviour. 
But from what would He save and deliver His 
people ? Not only from external tyranny or 
oppression, but also from their ovv^n sins and the 
results of those sins. The Old Testament as a 
whole is a record of the fact that though 
Israel was the chosen people, Israel was constantly 
out of touch with God because of Israel's sins. 
The prophets do not tire of warning the people 
that their high privilege of being God's people 
will avail them nothing if the}^ will not put away 



84 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



their sins and turn to God in repentance and 
amendment. According^, when the Messiah came 
He would show Himself the righteous ruler, 
executing justice and righteousness in the land, 
while Israel's sins (for it is the nation, rather than 
individuals, which appears as the sinner in the 
sight of God) will have been forgiven. 

The two ideas of the coming of Messiah, of 
the Kingdom of God, of the Righteous Ruler on 
the one hand, a.nd of the forgiveness of sins on the 
other, were inseparable, and could not but be 
so in a nation which alone of the great nations 
of antiquity took the idea of sin seriously, in 
representing the moral shortcomings and positive 
wickedness of man as an offence against a holy God 
and inevitably condemned by Him. Now, for 
the Christian Church Jesus was the Messiah. How 
then stood this matter of forgiveness and salvation ? 
How Avas it affected by the fact that He, " the 
one who should come " (Matt. xi. 3), had come ? 
What had He done in connection with it ? 

It was at this point that the fact of the Lord's 
death came into immediate prominence, its mean- 
ing lit up with the light which shone upon it from 
this quarter and that. In the first place, there 
were the Old Testament sacrifices ; these were 
bound up with the thought of the forgiveness of 
sins. The sacrifices were not magical acts ; they 
had no virtue of their own to ensure the forgive- 
ness of sins ; the gracious God alone could forgive 
sins. But that did not mean that the forgiveness 
of sins could not be brought into connection with, 
and work through, particular institutions or per- 
sons. So the sacrifices represented a connection 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 



86 



between the forgiveness of sins and the laying- 
down of hfe and the offering of that life to God. 
Once more — the greatest prophecy in the Old 
Testament is that contained in the last twenty- 
six chapters of the book of the prophet Isaiah. 
In the 53rd chapter of that book there was, to be 
read of all, the wonderful passage declaring that 
the violent death suffered by the mysterious 
Servant of Jehovah was endured by him, not 
because of his own sins but because of the sins of 
others — those others who should find themselves 
forgiven and profited by his bearing of their sins, 
sins laid on him by Jehovah. And besides all this, 
there was the fact that the Lord Himself had 
treated His death as a matter of the utmost im- 
portance, had described it as necessary, and as a 
ransom given for many, and had declared that in 
His blood shed for many there was a new covenant ; 
and of the new covenant, when it shall have been 
made between God and Israel, one of the^charac- 
teristics, according to Jeremiah (xxxi. 34), is that 
Jehovah will forgive their iniquity and remember 
their sins no more. 

In such considerations as these lay the Christian 
defence against Jews w^ho thought to show that 
the followers of Jesus stood condemned by the 
fact of the Crucifixion of Jesus. But herein, too, 
lay the secret of that Christian triumph and 
exultation in the Cross which felt no shame, 
whether before Jew or Gentile, in what St. Paul 
calls (1 Cor. i. 23) the proclamation of a crucified 
Messiah. Almost all the New Testament writers 
put the Cross into a position of the greatest 
prominence. They do not all regard it from 



86 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



exactly the same angle, they do not all say the 
same things about it. Why should they ? If 
Jesus was the Messiah, then Messiah's death was 
too great a thing for any one man, even a St. Paul 
or a St. John, to grasp its full significance. The 
Holy Spirit did not lead the apostles into all truth 
by leading them to see and to express the same 
thing in the same way, but by enlightening their 
understandings so that each according to his 
ability might utter some part of the truth as it was 
in Jesus, and in Jesus crucified. So we find St. 
Peter teaching in his sermon on the Day of Pente- 
cost that though the Jews had wickedly killed 
Jesus, yet the death of Jesus had its place in " the 
counsel and foreknowledge of God " (Acts ii. 23, 
and cf. iv. 28) ; Philip the deacon starts from the 
comparison of the Servant of Jehovah to the lamb 
taken to the slaughter, in Isaiah liii., to preach 
Jesus to the Ethiopian eunuch perplexed about 
the passage ; St. Paul tells the Ephesian elders 
that the Church of God which they superintend 
was purchased with the blood of God. Passing 
to the Epistles, there is an extraordinary wealth of 
allusions : for St. Peter, Christ is the One Who 
took away men's sins by bearing them " in His 
own body on the tree " (1 Peter ii. 24) ; for St. 
John, the proof of the love of God is the fact that 
He " sent His Son to be the propitiation for our 
sins " (1 John iv. 10), and the effect of the blood of 
Jesus is that Christians are cleansed from all sin 
(1 John i. 7) ; the Avriter of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews sees Christ as the true priest and true 
sacrifice ; the sacrifice of Himself once for all upon 
the Cb?oss being the one real sacrifice of which the 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 87 



Levitical sacrifices were but types, and to which 
they pointed forward ; as for St. Paul, his letters 
must be read closely and frequently if one is to 
gather anything like a full impression of all that 
he sees in the death of Christ. He tells the 
Corinthians (1 Cor. ii. 2) that when he came to 
them he was resolved not to know anything 
among them "save Jesus Christ and Him crucified," 
and his message to us is the same as his message 
to the Corinthian Church. What did not the 
Lord's death mean to him ? In it he saw the 
propitiation of God, the satisfaction of God's 
justice, God's wrath against sinners brought to an 
end, the reconciliation of God and man ; yet all 
this not as though Christ had intervened as a third 
between God and man, but " God was in Christ 
reconciling the world unto Himself , not imputing 
then? trespasses unto them " (2 Cor. v. 19). And 
the joint love of the Father and the Son for man 
in the Cross of Christ is most strikingly presented 
when, after saying how wonderful a thing it is 
that Chris b has died not for the righteous but for 
sinners, the Apostle continues : " But God com- 
mendeth His love towards us, in that, while we 
were yet sinners, Christ died for us " (Rom. v. 8). 
Or think again of the great passage in Colossians 
(i. 19, 20) : " It pleased the Father that in Him 
should all fulness dwell ; and, having made 
peace through the blood of His cross, by Him to 
reconcile all things unto Himself." Nothing is 
more necessary than to take St. Paul's teaching as 
a whole, and that whole includes at least these 
elements : sin necessarily calls down the anger of 
a holy God and deserves punishment ; God's wish 



88 THE MEANING OP THE CREED 



was not to destroy sinners but to forgive and save 
them, while reveaUng Himself as a God Who 
cannot treat sin as though it were not of all evils 
the worst ; God gives His Son to be incarnate, to 
be obedient even unto the death of the Cross ; by 
His life, and above all by His death, Christ does 
for man and as man what man could not have 
done for himself, for sinful man could never have 
made atonement and reparation to God for his sins, 
but this is what the sinless Christ effects by His 
perfect obedience, and by His willing submission 
to death, in which is seen God's penalty upon sin. 
Finally (and here St. Paul's thought reaches its 
climax, to which it is not easy for us to ascend, 
but which does not entirely escape our under- 
standing), Christ on the Cross, though He was 
always the beloved Son, though any thought of 
the wrath of God directed against Him as a Person 
could not be entertained for a single moment, 
experienced, because He was truly man, one with 
sinful humanity though Himself sinless, the mean- 
ing of God's wrath against sin, and of the penalty 
which sin must incur. Into that experience Christ 
entered, and that is what St. Paul means when he 
speaks of Christ as " being made a curse for us " 
(Gal. iii. 13), or made sin for us " (2 Cor. v. 21). 
Lastly, Christ, in the Revelation, is twenty-nine 
times spoken of as the Lamb, a title which, whether 
it refers to the lamb of the Passover or to the 
suffering Servant, represented as a lamb in 
Isaiah liii., throws into the foreground the idea of 
His sacrificial death. The great vision in the fifth 
chapter, of the " Lamb as it had been slain," is 
enough to show the depth of the impression made 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 89 



upon the writer by the Lord's death. Whatever 
differences there may be as regards outlook and 
interpretation in the New Testament wTiters, one 
could hardly exaggerate the importance to them 
of the death of Christ. It is in the New Testament 
first that we find Christian thought agreeing to 
proclaim in the words of a later wTiter — Domini 
mors potentior erat qitam vita : " the Lord's death 
was more powerful than His life." 

Why that death was so greatly prized we have 
now seen, also some of the interpretations of it 
which began almost at once to be made. But so 
wonderful was the thought — the Lord died for 
men — so rich and manysided the teaching of the 
New Testament, that it is no wonder that many 
different ideas, sometimes leading to almost con- 
trary conclusions, sprang up in the Church and 
were upheld by great theologians. Such a simple 
statement as " Christ died for men " gave rise to 
many questions. What exactly did the " for " 
imply ? Obviously it meant " for the advantage 
of men," but did it also mean " instead of men " ? 
Was Christ in His death the substitute for men ? 
Again, if it w^as said that Christ made atonement, 
in what did the atonement consist ? Did Christ 
offer some satisfaction to God which the sin of 
humanity made necessary ; if so, in what did this 
satisfaction consist ? Or was the atonement a 
making God and man at one, by showing man 
how much God had loved him since He had 
given His Son to die, and by thus arousing in 
man's heart a love of God and a desire to serve 
Him ? Then, was the language of the New 
Testament, the words used by Christ or about 



90 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Him, to express the work which He did by His 
death, to be taken literally ? For instance (and 
it serves very well to show what difficulties were 
sure to arise), the Lord had said that He had come 
" to give His life a ransom for many." In human 
experience a ransom, whereby some one is released 
from captivity, is paid to some one. The Lord 
released man by paying a ransom — ^to whom ? 
It may startle us to find that a great many of the 
ablest theologians ' of the Church in East and 
West alike, during the time covered by the third 
to the twelfth century, replied — to the Devil. 
For the Devil had certain rights over man, because 
man had sinned, and therefore if man w^as to be 
delivered from the Devil something was due to 
the Devil in return. But the Devil overreached 
himself by trying to get into his power Christ, 
over Whom he had no rights since Christ had not 
sinned. It was Anselm, the great Archbishop of 
Canterbury who died in 1109, who was finally, 
though not immediately, successful in destroying 
the whole idea of the Devil's rights, and in re- 
placing it by the altogether worthier thought that 
Christ by His willing acceptance of death, though 
as sinless He might have avoided it, offered a 
perfect satisfaction to God for man's sins. Yet 
this thought also gave rise to many questions. 
Speaking generally, we may say that the Church 
did not try to give hard and fast answers to these 
questions. That Christ died for the salvation of 
men, that His death had as its effect not simply the 
arousing of man's love and gratitude but also, and 
indeed primarily, a perfect satisfaction made to 
God for the sins of the whole world — this she 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 91 



taught without hesitation. Apart from this she 
left questions as to the precise reason whereby, 
the exact way in which, the Lord's death was an 
atonement for sin, to the schools of theology and 
her learned divines. There is no great Christian 
doctrine which has given rise to wider and more 
varied speculations, none on which the Church has 
been slower to condemn opinions as heretical. 

This is the situation with which we are faced 
to-day. But it does not at all follow that what a 
Christian thinks about the death of Christ is 
unimportant. It is sometimes said, " The fact of 
the Atonement saves us, not the holding of this or 
that theory about it." This is true enough if it 
only means that the atoning death can reach to 
and cover a person who holds no theory at all about 
it, or even holds an obviously false one. But it 
is not in the least true if it is intended to imply 
that it is no great matter what theory a man holds. 
This is not the case, because, in the first place, 
some theories are very much more satisfactory 
than others, and truth, even when it is only a 
greater degree of truth and not absolute truth, is 
not a matter of indifference ; and, secondly, the 
fact that " Christ died for men " ought to mean 
a great deal to a Christian man, and it will mean 
exceedingly little if he has really no idea of what 
is implied by those words. Let us see if we cannot 
advance some little way towards understanding 
them. 

There are two facts in our human life of which 
we are very conscious — sin and suffering. And 
these two facts are very closely connected with 
one another. Suffering is not always, but is 



92 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



exceedingly often, the result of sin, though (and 
this should be carefully noted) not necessarily the 
result of the sin of the individual sufferer. Again, 
suffering, or the punishment which involves 
suffering, is the right, the just consequence of sin. 
The words of the penitent thief express this very 
simply and truly : " We indeed justly [are in the 
same condemnation] ; for we receive the due 
reward of our deeds." And yet further : suffering 
can have a purifying effect, and that in two ways. 
First of all, the person who accepts punishment 
for sin in the right spirit finds that the suffering 
has a real power over his sin : it is a purging force, 
relieving the conscience of the weight of the sin, 
and strengthening the whole man to meet future 
temptations. Secondly, suffering, when it is volun- 
tarily accepted, as by the man who is prepared 
to suffer and die for some great cause, or when it 
is the suffering of compassion, whereby one person 
shares in the grief of another, and, as it were, 
takes over some portion of the weight of that 
grief, has real moral power. We look on the spirit 
of self-sacrifice as something specially noble, on 
sacrificial suffering as worth while, both because 
of its effect upon the soul of the one who gives 
himself to some great cause, and because of its 
influence outside the man himself. In the light 
of all this let us think of the death of Christ. Christ 
the incarnate Son of God came to help sinful men. 
That help took many forms. The fact of the 
Incarnation was in itself a help, for it showed how 
ready God was to come to the rescue of men, 
since He gave His Son to be Man among men. 
Christ's teaching and miracles of mercy were 



JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 93 



another way of help, for they raised men up to a 
nobler vision of human life, based on the great 
principle of love, and revealed God as the Father 
Who cared for the whole man, soul and body. 
But beyond all this there was the need that man 
should be right with God, that something should 
be done to repair all that was wrong in the relations 
between God and man on account of sin. God 
could not treat sin as anything but sin, could not 
simply pass it over, for it was not just a question 
of a number of individual sinners, but of mankind 
as a whole sinful and guilty (for in a moral world 
sin brings guilt with it) in the sight of a holy God. 
There was need for some great act of satisfaction 
to God made by man, some act of reparation and 
atonement, something which should show man 
as not only repentant but as willing to suffer the 
penalties which his past sin had deserved. Here, 
then, is the supreme help which Christ gave. He 
was made man, and as man He did for man what 
man, apart from Christ, could never have done for 
himself, since only the holy can make atonement 
to the holy, and man was not holy, but tied and 
bound by the chain of his sins. This atonement 
Christ wrought in His death, and that for two 
reasons, — first, because His life of continual obedi- 
ence to God's will reached its climax in His death 
of perfect obedience to that same will, for He 
Himself bears witness that the bitter cup which He 
drinks is given Him by the Father (John xvii. 
4 ; cf. Matt. xxvi. 39) ; secondly, because in death 
He submits to what is not His due. He endures 
willingly the sufferings, even up to the last suffering 
of death, which are the due reward of sin, and 



94 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



show God's wrath against sin. He stands where 
sinners should stand. He has made Himself 
one with sinful humanity, is identified with it, 
and so He cannot escape that connection of 
suffering and penalty with sin which is a law of 
the moral world ; yet though identified with man 
He does what sinful man could never do, for His 
identification with man stops absolutely short 
of an identification with man's sin. His death is 
the redeeming act, in virtue, not of the quantity 
of physical suffering, but of the complete sub- 
mission of His will to the will of the Father, and 
the practical acknowledgment, " Thou art righteous 
that j udgest. ' ' That acknowledgment brought with 
it the knowledge through experience of what is 
called " the pain of loss," that separation of man 
from God which stands in the first place as God's 
punishment of sin. The agony in the garden, 
the cry from the Cross, " My God, My God, why 
hast Thou forsaken Me ? " show us the incarnate 
Son entering into that shadow where the bright- 
ness of the face of God is withdrawn from man. 

And let us remember that all the time God was 
saving us through and in Christ. God did not 
desire to destroy man, but to save him. He was 
not an angry God, Whom only an innocent victim 
could appease, but the Father Whose holiness 
could not but react against sin. Whose righteous- 
ness could not but ask for some great act of 
reparation and atonement for sin from humanit}^, 
Whose love could not but desire the restoration 
and salvation of the sinner. So He gave His 
only Son to be one with man in life and death, 
to offer a life of perfect obedience and a death of 



JESUS CHRIST x\ND SIN 



95 



supreme submission, making in humanity's name 
the great confession, " True and righteous are 
Thy judgments, 0 God." So this work pleased 
God, and for the sake of that work we are accepted 
" in the Beloved," when we in penitence and faith 
ask God to look — not at the sins of each one of us, 
but upon that perfect work which the Perfect 
Man, the Second Adam, wrought for us. As the 
hymn says : — 

" Look, Father, look on His anointed face, 
And only look on us as found in Him ; 
Look not on our misusings of Thy grace, 

Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim : 
For lo ! between our sins and their reward 
We set the Passion of Thy Son, our Lord." 

Our Christian pra3^ers, our Christian sacraments, 
our Christian acts, all look towards that great 
sacrifice on Calvary. Christians differ as to the 
way in which the merits, the virtue, of that sacri- 
fice are applied to the soul of the individual 
sinner for forgiveness and for strength. They do 
not differ in believing that the Lord's death is the 
climax of that incarnation, that humbling Him- 
self " of the Son of God, which was for us men 
and for our salvation. And so when we say in 
the Creed, " Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
crucified, dead, and buried," let us remember 
that this is no unmeaning recitation of a number 
of historical facts, but that those facts come 
bringing to us the salvation of our God. 

There is but little space to speak of the follow- 
ing words, " He descended into hell." They are 
words of great comfort : when we think of the 
dead whom we love so well we ask : " What can 



96 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Ave know of that strange country to which they 
have passed ? " And we answer — it is a country 
where Christ has been. There is a beautiful 
hymn by Archbishop Maclagan which imagines 
for us the joy among the spirits of holy men of 
old when our Lord came among them. It is not 
mere imagination ; there is the promise to the 
dying thief, there is St. Peter's statement that 
" the gospel was preached also to them that are 
dead," and we ma\^ mention an old tradition which 
Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, who wrote at the end 
of the second century a.d., received from a 
presbyter who had listened to disciples of the 
Apostles, that Christ, when He descended into 
Hades, proclaimed there His advent, meaning, 
doubtless, His incarnation. And so Dr. H. B. 
Swete has pointed out that it was the privilege of 
the Church of Aquileia in North Italy, in whose 
Creed the words first stood, " to hand down to a 
remote age ... an apostolic belief which affirms 
that the Incarnate Son consecrated by His presence 
the condition of departed souls." 



VI 



THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 

" The third day He rose again from the dead." 

WHAT was the Resurrection which the 
Apostles set themselves to preach ? 
Why did the fact that they had seen Jesus 
alive after death assume for them such cardinal 
significance that it became the core of all their 
Creed and the end of all their teaching ? Why was 
it in itself a new Gospel for all mankind ? 

We must take their measure of it if we are 
ever to understand why it is the fundamental 
and decisive factor in the Christian religion. We 
must see it with their eyes, and bring to bear upon 
it their judgment of its values. So only can it 
become intelligible to us as an inspiration and a life. 

For, certainly, to them it was no mere ghost 
that they had seen returning from the grave, a 
thin ineffectual phantom hovering on the edge of 
our earthly frontiers, too frail to count among the 
solid things that constitute reality. It was no 
passing vision that came and went and left things 
as they were. It was no mere assurance that He 
Who had been dead was alive in some strange 
other world than this. It was no sudden and 
solitary miracle that just for once broke the 
dominion of natural law, and then after this 

G 



98 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



unique interruption left those laws to resume their 
immemorial routine. It was no unnatiu*al and 
abnormal wonder out of all context, unrelated, 
unanticipated, and unexplained. 

To them as they gradually apprehended it the 
Resurrection was the most natural and intelligible 
and normal fact that had ever occurred. It had 
been anticipated in every detail of the created 
life from the beginning of the world ; it was the 
one mystery at the heart of things, the secret up 
to which everything had led. Through it ran the 
single purpose into which the Divine Will had 
laboured to fashion the story of man. Out from 
it flowed all the force that was to carry on the 
story to its final consummation. 

So it held for them the key to all enigmas. 
It was the one firm base on which all human 
existence was built, and far from being a unique 
breach with natural law, it was itself the very bond 
by which nature was held together. 

That is what it had become as we find it in 
the Epistles of St. Paul, for instance, who was 
possessed of one prevailing passion, just to under- 
stand and to attain to the resurrection from the 
dead. Life, he felt, would be all too short to give 
full value to the central and dominant and in- 
exhaustible manifestation of the creative and 
redemptive mind of God ; for in it, as he believed, 
lay the solution of every problem, the inspiration 
of all conduct, the interpretation of all knowledge, 
and the crown of all desire. So he lived to follow 
it out and apprehend its fullness and power. So 
he prayed but one i^TSbjOY for his children in the 
faith that " the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 99 



Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of 
wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him : 
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened ; 
that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, 
and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance 
in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness 
of His power to us-ward who believe, according 
to the working of His mighty power, which He 
wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the 
dead" (Eph. i. 17-20). 

Now, how had the Resurrection come to mean 
all this ? Why did this transcendent miracle 
appear to the first disciples to be the one and only 
key by which to interpret the entire order of 
nature from the beginning of creation ? 

Well, first, it was because nature, the natural 
order, had been broken to pieces under their eyes. 
Just think what they had experienced. They had 
learned from their splendid psalms, for instance, 
how all nature, in its delicate and seemly order, 
moved upward from level to level, through plant 
and fish and bird and beast to man, the crowning 
act of evolution, " man going forth to his work, 
and to his labour until the evening," in the midst 
of that busy and harmonious activity of the world. 
And out of man God had selected their own people 
for special spiritual training — drawn nearer to 
God than any other. The God of all the nations 
had loved and chosen Zion, that through it He 
might declare His Will to all the people on the face 
of the earth. And out of Zion there should come 
at last the crown of human growth, the con- 
summation of human effort, the Man after God's 
own heart, the Anointed, the Beloved. Up to 



100 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



that consummation all endeavours led, through 
centuries of travail and discipline and suffering 
and deliverance. 

And at last He had come. He was there in 
flesh and blood, the Hope of Israel, the Desire of 
all nations, the Beloved Son, the satisfaction of 
all the long prayer, the justification of all the 
painful struggle, the end of all desire : Jesus of 
Nazareth. 

They had lived intimately with Him for some 
blessed years, and they had seen and touched and 
handled the Word of Life. They had committed 
their whole souls to Him ; they had trusted from 
the very bottom of their hearts that this was He 
Who should redeem Israel. 

And then they had to stand by, powerless and 
dumb and blind, while the vision was shattered 
and the hope crushed. Their Life was slain. All 
that was good and gracious and holy in man had 
gone under, broken and defeated, beneath the 
tyranny of evil. And worse. God had made no 
sign. He had failed His Anointed. There had 
been no rescue, no delivera;nce. Hung there on 
the cursed tree. He, the Blessed One, had fallen 
under the curse. He had cried aloud to God 
and had cried in vain. Down the black night 
fell ; the storm broke. A grim and terrible 
silence had closed over Him Whose very word had 
been life. The uttermost disaster had overtaken 
the one and only hope on which man's whole 
heart had been staked. There was no more light. 
Life had ceased to have any purpose in it, any 
end to propose, any goal to reach. It closed in a 
supreme act of disillusion, a mad mockery of all 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 101 



that gave it worth and honour and beauty and 
truth. There was nothing now for them to Uve 
for, and nothing to pray for. Nature was 
emptied of all joy or significance ; conscience 
was wrecked ; thought was beggared ; love was 
deceived. Everything that man held dear lay 
in ruins about them. God's face was hidden ; 
all was lost. 

So they lay in the dust on the floor of that 
Upper Chamber with the doors shut until, ac- 
cording to the most vivid personal record, the light, 
hurried step of a woman on the stairs bade them 
open the doors in fear. And the strange news 
was in their ears : " They have taken away the 
Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not 
where they have laid Him." And Peter ran 
as he had never run before, and that other 
disciple ran faster still, and they saw the linen 
clothes lying, and as they saw, suddenly believed. 

And then He was found standing in the midst 
of them, and saying, "Peace be unto you. Why 
are ye troubled ? Behold My hands and My feet, 
that is I myself." So the record declares. 

And with the vision of the Risen Lord, all life 
stood upright once again. It was not the mere 
comfort of knowing Jesus was alive beyond death. 
But what they saw was this : that God's purpose 
had never broken ; God's will had held true. He 
had never failed Himself. There had been no 
withdrawal, no lapse, and no disaster. The pain, 
the misery, the woe, the agony, the death, had all 
been leading up to a prepared and purposed close. 
They had worked towards this end, the Risen Man, 
the Resurrection from the Dead. 



102 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 

That Risen Man was the cuhnination of all 
that man could ever be, the fruit of all his past, 
the true and proper crown of all his endeavour. 
In the Risen Christ human history had touched 
its goal. In Him humanity had won its way to 
fruition. It had realised its full values. It had 
attained. 

Everything leads up to this, and all becomes 
coherent agam. Bone by bone, as it were, the 
parts of man came together to build up a perfect 
bod}^, into which a living spirit has breathed its 
breath. God has prepared for HimseK a Man 
Who has gathered up into His own Will the enthe 
mass of human desire, the whole varied volume 
of human experience, and has carried it forward 
on to a new level, won through death, so that it is 
now transfigured through and through by the 
powers of an eternal life in the might of Him Who 
has filled it with the splendour of His resurrection 
glory. 

All the woeful agony, then, which had seemed 
to them to be the OA^erthrow of all hope for man, 
the signal of some moral anarchy, the proof of a 
devil's triumph, the evidence that aU was lost as 
the Christ went down under the tyranm^ of evil 
into the ab^^ss of death — all this was inside the 
purpose which led to the Resm-rection. It was 
the material through which the purpose passed on 
to its achievement. It was no blind and stupid 
disaster. It was part of the Divine counsel, that 
out of this suffering and death should be m''ung 
the final victor}^ It had a meaning, and therefore 
it had been deliberately accepted. The Christ had 
known it all and bowed His head to it, shrinking 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 103 



indeed from its bitterness, but willing to learn 
obedience through suffering, and ready to commit 
Himself to the Father's Will. By this consent 
it was fired through and through with the spirit 
of sacrifice. It was changed by this from shame 
to glory. It was made the one pure and perfect 
and acceptable offering. It cancelled sin and 
redeemed humanity. Because He had humbled 
Himself to a slave's death, the death of a convict 
upon the Cross, therefore God had highly exalted 
Him and given Him a name above every name. 

He was declared to be the Son of God with 
power, by the Resurrection from the dead " 
(Rom. i. 4). 

So the great Creed was built up which stretches 
itself out to embrace the entire drama of man 
from creation to the end of the world. That 
drama has found its supreme solution. It can 
unroll its long story from act to act with an ever- 
growing consistency of design now that the crisis 
has come which illuminates the past, and mani- 
fests the present, and decrees the future. Given 
the Resurrection from the dead, all human life 
is intelligible. So long as you stop short in the 
natural man, in man imder the limitation of mere 
nature, as a creature of this earth, you have no 
coherent account to make of him. He arrives at 
no satisfying end ; he is crossed and thwarted by 
disaster ; he finds no adequate fulfilment ; his 
ideals break into fragments ; his goal is pushed 
farther and farther off ; his purposes end in 
vanity ; his end is confusion. 

And, therefore, this great conclusion is reached : 
that it is only by the addition of a supernatural 



104 THE MEANING OP THE CREED 



outlook that the natural man shows what he is 
really meant for. Only by seeing this life on 
earth, so incomplete in itself, as a school for 
another life beyond death, does this earthly life 
itself acquire reality and consistency. Only by 
looking beyond death can death itself become 
intelligible. Only so can you give any rational 
value to the sorrow and pain that haunt us here. 
Only by starting from the resurrection from the 
dead can you see this life steadily and see it whole. 

Now, if this is what the Eesurrection meant to 
the disciples, then it is entirely unique. It has 
no parallel whatever in history. It is not a mere 
incident : it contains an entire creed. It is no 
decorative appendage to a career, which might 
be possibly omitted without loss to the career 
itself. Rather, it is the formative and organic 
secret which gives light and value to everything 
else. Nothing could be less like it than stories of 
men who have made so profound an impression 
for good or evil upon their contemporaries that 
no one could believe them to be dead, but looked 
to their coming again. Every form, indeed, of 
the theory of apotheosis contradicts flatly all the 
recorded facts. Far from the enthusiastic faith 
of the disciples sufficing to create the belief in His 
reappearance after death, their faith had so 
completely broken down under the blow of the 
Cross that nothing short of the insistent and 
irresistible impact of the fact could avail to recreate 
it. Moreover, there was no material in their minds 
out of which a suggestion of what we have described 
could emerge. The Old Testament has nothing 
that in the least corresponds to the complex idea 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 105 



which the Resurrection embodied. The records 
of our Lord's life tell us frankly enough that even 
when our Lord reiterated the word Resurrection 
in their ears they never took it in. It conveyed 
nothing positive to them. And the Agony of the 
Cross, when it fell upon them, obliterated, it 
would seem, every memory of what might have 
given them some vague comfort in the crisis. It 
is extraordinarily convincing that they should 
themselves report their own total lack of under- 
standing at the time. 

And then there is nothing that even attempts 
to account for the entire change in the disciples 
from men of dull and distressing impotence in the 
Gospels to men of amazing courage, insight, and 
resolution in the Acts, except the reality of the 
fact that the Lord had risen to a life of energy 
and power by the force of w^hich fact they were 
seized from without, and over-mastered, and trans- 
formed. On any other hypothesis, this miraculous 
transformation of character remains wholly in- 
explicable. 

And it is this signal transformation which He, 
the Lord as risen, has power to work through the 
Spirit on all who believe in Him, which would 
always be the best and final evidence of the fact 
that He rose again. The existence of the Christian 
Church is the only proof of the Resurrection that 
we now can verify in our own experience. The 
historical evidence for the fact is of singular force ; 
but it is, of course, subject to all the limitations 
that are bound to beset the historical evidence 
for very remote facts. Such evidence can never 
be absolute. The impression it produced must be 



106 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



subject to every variety of temperament ; and 
will depend for its convincing force on all kinds of 
presuppositions in the mind of the person to whom 
the proof is offered. In this particular case, the 
evidence bears the mark of validity, of reality, 
just because, while it is unwavering in its assertion 
of the actual fact, it nevertheless has not attempted 
to harmonise the incidental fluctuations and con- 
tradictions of the several witnesses. It has 
candidly left these unsolved. That the Body 
was gone and the Tomb empty they one and all 
assert without a doubt ; and about this pains 
are taken to show how complete and reliable is 
the witness. For it was the very women who 
had seen where exactl}^ it was laid who go to the 
same spot to find it gone. That the Lord was 
seen by His disciples in a bodily form, which was 
indeed changed from its old conditions so that at 
first they hardly recognised it, yet which had an 
essential identity of character with the Body 
which had been His in His earthly life, and made 
Him still to be the very Man whom they had know n 
— on this they are one and all positively agreed. 
But in what exact order of time the various visions 
were seen, and why it was that the visions should 
be promised them in Galilee and then, after all, 
occur mainly in Jerusalem, they did not attempt 
to explain. This fixed agreement on the fact, 
combined with uncertainty in details, corresponds 
precisely with what we should expect, if the tale 
were undoubtedly true. Take an instance. When 
Samuel Wilberforce, the famous Bishop of Win- 
chester, fell from his horse and broke his neck in 
a Surrey woodland, Sir Thomas Farrer and his 



RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 107 



servants were hastily summoned from the cricket- 
ground, where they were playing, to pick up his 
body and carry it to Abinger House, where Sir 
Thomas lived. They were greatly moved by the 
sudden tragedy, and the incident was deeply im- 
printed in their memories. Yet, on the very 
next day, when they were asked to guide Press- 
men to the spot, they could not agree as to where 
exactly it was : and when the time came for 
placing a memorial Cross, no reconciliation of the 
various statements was found possible, and the 
only thing to be done was to accept Sir Thomas 
Farrer's verdict as master of the house. Yet this 
uncertainty of impression was consistent with the 
absolute certainty that there on that ground they 
had found the body and had carried it home. 
This little parallel may serve to show how entirely 
the evidence for the Resurrection corresponds to 
the type which such evidence will naturally take. 
It is as good evidence as you could wish of its 
kind ; but the proofs that convince the soul must 
always be of another type. They cannot belong 
to that order of evidence which would count in 
a law court. They must be themselves alive with 
spiritual energy. They must be the outcome of 
the fact itself, so that the fact carries with it its 
own evidence by virtue of its own inherited self- 
verification. The Resurrection must prove itself 
by that which it does. It has shown itself as an 
operative cause of great power on the stage of 
human history. We can follow its work amidst 
scenery that we know and understand, until it 
arrives down the centuries at our own immediate 
date, and presses itself in upon our own experience. 



108 THE MEANING OP THE CREED 



According to what it has proved itself, and can 
still prove itself to be, we shall be persuaded to 
believe it really happened. 

And if it can so verify itself to us as a real and 
effective actuality, then we shall accept the account 
of those who were its immediate witnesses for the 
form in which it actually manifested itself to them. 
We have surely no choice about this. They alone 
saw and heard. They alone had been selected 
and equipped for this very purpose by the Master, 
that they might become witnesses of His Resur- 
rection. They had companioned with Him from 
the baptism of John till His death. They ate 
and drank with Him after He rose from the dead. 
They felt His breath upon them in the Upper 
Chamber. They saw the wounds in His hands. 
And, moreover, they held together, in a single 
unbroken nucleus, for twenty or thirty years in 
order to deliver this their witness in the very spot 
where the Body had been buried and had dis- 
appeared — the very spot where their tale could be 
best challenged and disproved if it were not true. 
They never left that spot of witness until the 
invading hosts, gathering for the destruction of 
Jerusalem, drove them perforce off the ground. 
Such was their deliberate, organised and concerted 
evidence, which they set themselves to deliver 
and to secure from the first moment of the Church's 
existence. And what it was that they so asserted 
we know from the primitive records of St. Peter's 
earliest speeches in the Acts, and from the fixed 
tradition to which St. Paul appeals in the fifteenth 
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, as 
well as from the allusions which he makes to what 



EESUHRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 109 



was common gromid to all believers in the Resur- 
rection. It is clear that they themselves believed 
that What had died and been buried rose again. 
What was the nature of the change worked upon 
it they did not attempt to define ; but that which 
had been His Body in the days of the flesh they 
believed to be His Body still ; only it had become 
a Spiritual Body, a Body, that is, raised to a 
spiritual level, a perfect organ of spirit, qualified 
to live the life of spirit ; but still a Body, a Sacra- 
ment of the Spirit, an outward expression of an 
inward spiritual reality, with some identity of 
structure and function with what it had been. In 
it and by it Christ was recognised as having taken 
with Him into the new life all that had made Him a 
real Man while He was here, all that had identified 
His nature with ours, all that had been manifested 
to men on earth in terms of flesh and blood. He 
was still, after death, the Jesus Whom John had 
seen and touched and loved ; on Whose breast 
he had lain ; the Jesus Whose eyes had read men's 
souls and Whose voice had been in their ears, and 
Whose hands had healed. That Manhood of His 
which had gone down to death was recovered and 
retained ; and still His life in the Spirit would 
come to them in a form which it was right to speak 
of as a Body broken and as Blood shed. Still 
there was a Body of His of which, now, they all 
became members, and which was so verily akin 
to our own bodily nature that it became an ever- 
lasting pledge that He Who had raised our souls 
from the death of sin would finally quicken also 
our mortal bodies by the Spirit that dwelleth in us, 
so that even now on earth the body may become 



110 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



dead to its sin and we ma}: present it a living 
sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God. 

This was the Gospel delivered by St. Paul — 
a Gospel which was not of his own making, for 
he had received it — how that Christ died for our 
sins according to the Scriptures, and w^as bmied, 
and rose again on the third day. He Whose Body 
was buried rose again. It was sown a natural 
Body ; it was raised a Spiritual Body. And in 
it He was seen of Cephas, then of the Twelve, 
after that of about five hundred brethren at once, 
of whom some remained and some had fallen 
asleep ; after that of James ; and then last of all 
of Paul — for whom life had henceforth but one 
piu^pose and but one desire, that he might himself 
attain unto the Resurrection from the Dead. 



VII 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 



" He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God 
the Father Almighty." 



HE third day He rose again from the 



1 dead ; He ascended into heaven, And 
sitteth on the right hand of God the Father 
Almighty." These three articles in that section 
of the Apostles' Creed which refers to our Lord 
Jesus Christ are closely related. It is the second 
and the third of them which we have now 
to consider. The article which deals with the 
Ascension is an acknowledgment of our belief in an 
event which we assign to the sphere of history as 
having once taken place on earth. On the other 
hand, the article which deals with the Lord's 
Session at the right hand of God is an acknowledg- 
ment of our belief in a fact which belongs to the 
unseen and divine world, and which, therefore, 
we assign to the sphere of theology. The historical 
event is the basis of the theological fact. For the 
Church has always regarded the Ascension as an 
assurance that the Lord Jesus Christ, Who was 
truly born. Who truly died, and Who truly rose 
the third day from the dead, now truly " sitteth 
on the right hand of God the Father Almighty." 
There are two matters which seem to lie on the 




112 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



tlireshold of our subject ; and for the sake of 
clearness it is well at the beginning to say a word 
about each of them. 

(1) We are conscious that there are two worlds. 
There is the world of phenomena, the world of 
time and of place, in which we are, and which we 
think that we know. There is also the world of 
final realities, apart from time and apart from 
space, to which belong God and the things of God, 
and to apprehend which we have no faculties 
given to us. The revelation of God in our Lord 
Jesus Christ pertains to the world of time and of 
place ; under the conditions of time and of place 
it was wrought out ; and in language limited by 
those conditions the record of that revelation has 
come to us. It is not without cause that Ave 
remind ourselves of this elementary truth. For 
we are sometimes tempted in our thoughts about 
the Lord's manifestation on earth to endeavour 
to make a brief and sudden excursion into that 
other world of final realities which lies wholly 
beyond our powers to conceive and to contemplate ; 
and the outcome of that fruitless endeavour is 
confusion and perplexity. But specially do we 
need to be on our guard against this temptation 
when we are dealing with the Resurrection, and 
the Ascension. For these events (as we believe 
them to be) lie on the frontier of the two worlds. 
We may well think that in them, if we could grasp 
their final interpretation, we should find that we 
have a reconciliation of the antithesis between 
the two worlds, the world of phenomena and the 
world of final reality. Yet it remains certain 
that, while we are what we are, we must be 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 113 



content to think and speak of these supreme 
events in terms of time and place. 

(2) What is the relation of the Resurrection 
and the Ascension of our Lord ? In speaking of 
the subject we are brought at once into the region 
of modern controversies. On the one hand, the 
tendency of much recent criticism and thought is 
to deny that there was an Ascension of the Lord 
distinct from the Resurrection, and to explain 
the Resurrection itself not as a definite event 
but rather as an assurance, conveyed to the 
disciples by means of visions, that their Master 
had survived death and was with God. On the 
other hand, the faith of the Universal Church, 
expressed in the Creeds, is (if I may venture to 
translate it into my own words) that all the 
elements of the Lord's humanity were preserved 
in death and raised from death, so transfigured 
that they were brought into a true unity and 
perfectness corresponding to the spiritual order 
into which He had now passed ; and that the 
historical event of a true Resurrection was after 
an interval followed by the historical event of a 
true Ascension. At the same time it must be 
fully recognised that as a matter of history it was 
the Resurrection which changed the Apostles 
and their companions and which thus became the 
birthday of the Christian Church (comp., e,g., 
1 Peter i. 3), and further, that, as the coronation 
of a monarch is implied in his accession, so (if 
the analogy may be permitted) the Ascension 
was involved in the Resurrection. When the Lord 
appeared to His disciples on that third day, He 
had already ceased to be subject to the laws which 

H 



114 THE MEANING OP THE CREED 



govern man's life on earth ; already He had 
entered on a mode of being which was divine. 
He came indeed to His followers ; but He came 
to them as a visitor from a higher w^orld. For 
Him glory had already taken the place of humilia- 
tion (comp. Phil. iii. 21). Thus the Ascension 
confirmed and enlarged rather than originated the 
disciples' conviction as to their Master's exaltation. 
In a true sense we may conceive of the Ascension 
as an event subordinate to the Resurrection. We 
must not be surprised if the latter, as compared 
with the former, holds a position primary and 
supreme in the teaching of the Apostolic Church. 

In the Creed we confess our belief in the 
Ascension of our Lord as an event distinct from 
His Resurrection. An alleged historical event 
can be established only by an appeal to results 
caused by it and by an appeal to testimony. It 
must be conceded at once that the results of the 
Ascension cannot be separated from the results 
of the Resurrection. Together they explain the 
origin of the Christian Church. But, as we have 
just seen, the Resurrection dominated early 
Christian thought ; and if it were maintained 
that the great issue was due to the Resurrection 
alone, there could be no proof to the contrary. 
We turn therefore to the question of testimony. 

If any one examines a collection of Christian 
Creeds, he will see for himseK that the Creeds of 
the East and of the West alike contain articles 
of faith in the Resurrection of the Lord on the third 
day, in the Ascension, in the Session at the right 
hand of God. It is needless to labour this point. 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 115 



But there is an earlier stage in the history of the 
confessions of the Christian faith of which account 
must be taken. I refer to those creed-like state- 
ments of belief in writers of the second century, 
in some of which, if not in all, we catch echoes of 
very early Creeds, or at least see Creeds in process 
of formation. These Creed-like statements meet 
us in the Tracts of TertuUian of Carthage {circ. 
A.D. 190-215), in the controversial Treatise of 
Irenaeus {circ, a.d. 175-190), in Justin Martyr's 
Apologies on behalf of the Christians addressed 
to the Heathen and to the Jews (circ, a.d. 140- 
160), and in the Apology of Aristides {circ, a.d. 
125-130) addressed to the Emperor Hadrian. Of 
such passages two specimens will suffice. Irenaeus 
was born in Asia Minor, where he was the pupil 
of Polycarp of Smyrna (himself the pupil of St. 
John) ; he lived and taught in Rome ; and later 
he became Bishop of Lyons in South Gaul. Thus 
Irenaeus is a link between different generations 
and between widely separated regions. In his 
" Treatise against Heresies " (1. 10 If,, ed. Massuet) 
he insists that the Church, " scattered throughout 
the whole world, even unto the ends of the earth," 
" carefully preserves as though she dwelt in one 
single house " the faith which she " received from 
the Apostles and from their disciples." And in 
his setting forth of this faith there occur the words, 
" the passion and the resurrection from the dead 
and the assumption in the flesh into heaven of 
the Beloved, even Christ Jesus our Lord." Again, 
Aristides tells the Emperor that " the Christians 
are reckoned in descent from the Lord Jesus Christ," 
and then records the Christians' faith about their 



116 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Founder : " Through the Cross, of His own free 
will and counsel, He tasted death according to a 
mighty dispensation ; and after three days He 
revived and went up into heaven." The testi- 
mony, then, to this article of the Creed — " He 
ascended into heaven " — so universal, so early, so 
clear, is a strong indication that it was part, if we 
may use the expression, of the original deposit ; 
that, in other words, it came to the Churches of 
the second century through the many streams 
which flowed from that watershed of Christian 
thought and teaching, the Apostolic age. 

Is this conclusion verified by a study of the 
documents of the New Testament ? For the 
purposes of the brief review which follows I have 
arranged the Books of the New Testament in 
groups. This arrangement must not be taken as 
implying a decisive judgment on questions of date 
and authorship — e.g., the question of the later 
date {circ. a.d. 95) or the earlier date {circ. a.d. 68) 
of the Apocalypse, and the question whether the 
author of the Apocalypse is the author of the 
Fourth Gospel. 

(1) The Johannine Books : 

(a) The Gospel : vi. 62 ; vii. 39 ; xiv. 2/., 28 ; 
XV. 26 ; xvi. 7, 28 ; xx. 17 (where the Lord is 
represented on the morning of the Resurrection 
as implying His future Ascension and as speaking 
of His Resurrection-life as involving the Ascension 
—"I ascend"). 

(6) The First Epistle : The words, " We have 
an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the 
righteous " (ii. 1), imply the idea of the Lord's 
return to, and close communion with, the Father. 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHEIST 117 



(c) The Apocalypse : xii. 5 (where the woman 
travailing appears to signify the Church of Israel, 
the child born of her to signify the Messiah ; it is 
added : " and her child was caught up unto God 
and unto His throne "). For the Session, see iii. 
21 and (under different imagery) v. 6; vii. 17; 
xxii. 3. 

(2) The First Epistle of St. Peter : iii. 21 /. 
" through the resurrection of Jesus Christ ; who 
is on the right hand of God, having gone into 
heaven " (where the mention of the Resurrection, 
the journey into heaven, and the Session will be 
noticed) ; comp. i. 21 (where the words " and 
gave him glory " naturally, though not necessarily, 
refer to the Ascension). 

(3) The Epistle to the Hebrews : It would 
hardly be an exaggeration to say that the theme 
of this Epistle is the Gospel of the Ascension, This 
" Gospel " meets us not in isolated allusions ; it 
is rather written large over the whole letter. For 
at the heart of its teaching lies the parallel between 
the many High Priests of Israel and the one High 
Priest of the human race, " Jesus, the Son of God." 
The successive High Priests on the Day of Atone- 
ment offered the sacrifice and then passed through 
the veil and with the blood of the sacrifice entered 
into the Holy of Holies. The Lord Jesus offered 
Himself and then " passed through the heavens " 
(iv. 14) " into heaven itself, now to appear before 
the face of God for us " (ix. 24). The Ascension 
is the centre of the theology of this Book. More- 
over, characteristic emphasis is also laid on the 
thought of the Session (i. 3 ; viii. 1 ; x. 12 ; xii. 2) ; 
and in two of the four passages just referred to 



118 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



(viii. 1 ; X. 12) this image of kingly dignity is added 
to the image of High Priestly ministration. A 
review of the teaching of this Epistle justifies two 
assertions. First, such an interpretation as this 
writer gives to the Ascension is obviously the 
outcome of protracted thought. The Ascension 
as a great event must long have been before his 
mind. In the second place, he clearly assumes a 
knowledge of the Ascension on the part of his 
readers. He could not hope to help them by his 
own nwstic thoughts unless he was assured that 
the basis of fact on which he built up his thoughts 
was familiar to them. 

(4) The Pauline Epistles : 

{a) The Pastoral Epistles : The one passage 
in these Epistles which contains a reference to the 
Ascension is a quotation. Two primitive Christian 
hymns are cited in the New Testament. It is 
remarkable that the inspiration of the first (Eph. 
V. 14) is the Resurrection of Christ, while the 
climax of the second, adduced in 1 Tim. iii. 16, is 
the Ascension of Christ — " He was received up in 
glory." Again we infer that the Ascension was 
a matter of common knowledge to the Christians 
of those days. 

{h) The^ Epistles of the first Captivity: The 
Epistle to the Ephesians is of special importance 
in regard to our present inquir3\ In it St. Paul 
sets forth his doctrine of the Church and of the 
relation of the Church to the Person of Christ. 
Here, then, we should expect to find clear refer- 
ences to the Ascension and the Session ; and our 
expectation is not disappointed. In i. 20 /. the 
Session is spoken of as a stage in the exaltation 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 119 



of Christ distinct from, and subsequent to, the 
Resurrection (comp. ii. 6). And if it is urged that 
the Ascension itself had no place in the writer's 
thoughts about the regnant Christ, a later passage 
in the Epistle supplies the seeming deficiency. In 
iv. 8 ff, the Apostle applies to Christ the words of 
Ps. Ixviii. 18, " Thou hast ascended on high." The 
testimony of these sayings is clear and explicit. 
But the witness of the Epistle to the acknowledg- 
ment by the Apostle and his correspondents of the 
Ascension and the Session does not depend on 
particular phrases. They together constitute an 
axiom without which the characteristic teaching 
of the Epistle would have been impossible. In the 
other Epistles of this group the following passages 
will repay careful study : Col. iii. 1 ff. ; Phil. ii. 
9ff,; iii. 20/. 

(c) The Epistles of Paul the Traveller : In the 
Epistle to the Romans two passages stand out. 
In viii. 34 ("It is Christ Jesus that died, yea 
rather, that was raised from the dead. Who is at 
the right hand of God, Who also maketh inter- 
cession for us ") the abiding fact of the Session is 
mentioned as distinct from the event of the Re- 
surrection. In Rom. X. 6 ff, we have a mystical 
rabbinic exposition of the words of Deut. xxx. 
12 Jf, which may well seem foreign to our modern 
ways of thinking ; but to me at least this is clear, 
that, on the one hand, no one could have written 
that comment (" Who shall descend into the abyss? 
(that is, to bring Christ up from the dead) ") who 
did not know that Christ had died and been buried 
(comp. 1 Cor. xv. 3) ; and, on the other hand, no 
one could have written that comment (" Who 



120 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



shall ascend into heaven ? (that is, to bring Christ 
down) ") who did not know that Christ had as- 
cended into heaven. In the First Epistle to the 
Corinthians the words, "when He shall deliver up 
the kingdom to God, even the Father," and " for 
He must reign, till He hath put all enemies under 
His feet " (xv. 24 /.), imply a belief in Christ's 
Session at the right hand of God. This belief, 
indeed, is the whole content of that brief formula 
" Jesus is Lord " which there is good ground for 
regarding as the primitive Christian Creed (1 Cor. 
xii. 3 ; Rom. x. 9 ; comp. e.g. 1 Cor. viii. 6 ; 
Phil. ii. 11 ; Acts ii. 36). Finally there is in this 
group of Epistles a series of eschatological passages 
which appear to postulate an Ascension of our Lord 
into heaven and His Session there as King. These 
are 1 Thess. iv. 16 (" The Lord Himself shall de- 
scend from heaven ") ; v. 23 ; 2 Thess. i. 7 ; ii. 1 ; 
2 Cor. i. 14; v. 10. 

As we review the testimony of the Epistles 
we must remember two of their characteristics. 

(1) Their references to the events which belong to 
the historic faith of the Church are incidental and 
not systematic ; and the events of the Lord's 
life to which allusion is made are strangely few. 

(2) Their references to these few events are bare of 
details. How little do we learn from the Epistles 
as to the circumstances even of the Lord's death 
or of His Resurrection ! 

We now turn to the Synoptic Gospels and the 
Acts. From the other Books of the New Testa- 
ment we have gathered such evidence as we had 
a right to expect from them that the early 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 121 



Apostolic Churches believed in the Lord's Session at 
the right hand of God (the source of their phrase- 
ology being Ps. ex. 1) and in an Ascension of the 
Lord into heaven. 

The First Gospel closes with the notice of a 
meeting between the risen Lord and the disciples 
in Galilee, and with a record of words spoken by 
the Lord which clearly looked forward to a final 
parting. 

The Second Gospel abruptly breaks off with a 
statement about the women on the morning of 
the Resurrection — "for they were afraid" (xvi. 8). 
The present ending of this Gospel belongs probably 
to the period which immediately succeeded the age 
of the Apostles. It is largely a compilation from 
the Canonical Gospels, and is valuable as a witness 
to what was known and thought by Christians in 
the early years probably of the second centurj'. 
Its words are distinct : "So then the Lord Jesus, 
after He had spoken unto them, was received up 
into heaven and sat down at the right hand of 
God." 

It must, then, be candidly admitted that the 
narrative of the Ascension rests on the authority 
of a single writer, the author of the Thnd Gospel 
and of the Acts. There seems to be no reason to 
question, and there are several considerations 
which confirm, the ver}^ early traditional view 
which identifies this writer with St. Luke. If we 
accept this identification, and if we would estimate 
the value of St. Luke's authority as an historian, 
we must remember two facts. (1) St. Luke was 
the friend and companion of St. Paul (comp. Col. 
iv. 14 ; 2 Tim. iv. 11 ; and the so-called " we " 



122 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



passages of the Acts — ix. xvi. 10-16; xx. 5-xxviii. 
16) ; and St. Paul some five to eight 3^ears after 
the Ascension spent a fortnight at Jerusalem with 
Cephas and James (Gal. i. 18/.), and fourteen years 
later met St. John also at Jerusalem (Gal. ii. 1, 9). 
(2) St. Luke himself, as we learn from the Acts 
(xxi. 15 jj.), some quarter of a century after the 
Ascension visited Jerusalem with St. Paul and 
became known to St. James and to the Elders of 
the Church there, some at least among whom must 
have seen and heard the Lord ; and during at any 
rate part of St. Paul's two 3^ears' imprisonment at 
Csesarea St. Luke was in Palestine. Thus, partly 
through his own intercourse with some of them, 
partly indirect^ through his friendship with St. 
Paul, St. Luke was brought into contact with those 
who were primary witnesses to the great facts of 
the Gospel. 

The narrative of the Ascension in the Gospel 
according to St. Luke (xxiv. 50 ff.) is very brief, 
but is singularly impressive : " While he blessed 
them, he parted from them, and was carried up 
into heaven." Two points, however, must be 
considered. (1) It is urged that there is no break 
in the narrative, and that therefore St. Luke places 
the Ascension on the evening of the day of the 
Resurrection, and thus contradicts what he himself 
sa3^s of the forty da^^s in Acts i. 3. Of this objection 
it must suffice here to say that it is obvious that on 
this last page of his Gospel St. Luke is giving a 
rapid summar}^ of events ; and further that else- 
where he records sayings of Christ without defining 
their relation to the preceding context (see e,g, xii. 
54; xiii. 6; xvi. 1), and that therefore we are justified 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 123 



in thinking that the words " And he said unto 
them " {v. 44) introduce a new scene, and preface 
sayings which were spoken at a later time than the 
evening of the first Easter day.* (2) The Revised 
Version has the marginal note : " Some ancient 
authorities omit and was carried up into heaven,^' 
The question raised by this note obviously cannot 
be discussed here. It may, however, be said with 
some confidence that the " ancient authorities " 
referred to are remarkable for their omissions as 
well as for their additions of words and clauses, f 
If these words are omitted, all mention of an 
Ascension is, of course, eliminated, while yet the 
whole solemn context and the position of the 
narrative at the very close of the treatise indicate 
that the writer is recording what he knows to be 
a final parting. But the opening paragraph of 
the Acts includes in the scope of the first treatise " 
all that Jesus did and taught " until the day in 
w^hich he was received up." To most minds this 

* A passage in the so-called Epistle of Barnabas (xv. 9) is often 
quoted as affirming that the Ascension took place on the day of the 
Resurrection. It runs thus : " Wherefore also we keep the eighth day 
for rejoicing, in which Jesus did both rise from the dead and, when He 
had manifested Himself, went up into heaven." The passage therefore 
rather asserts that the Resurrection and the Ascension took place on 
different Sundays. 

t It is perhaps right to say that I discussed this question in a book — 
The Syro-Latin Text of the Gospels — published some twenty ye^irs ago. 
I there offered an explanation of the omission which I believe to be at 
least worthy of serious consideration. As the matter is an important 
one, I venture to quote what I then wrote (p. 131 n.) : " The reading of 
the Sinaitic Old Syriac text explains how the omission in the Western 
texts may have arisen. It has : ' And-when He blessed them. He- 
was-lifted-iip hom.-the77i.' Here plainly the Syriac has a com- 
pressed rendering of the two clauses ' He parted from them, and was 
carried up mto heaven,' the ideas being preserved, the phraseology 
abbreviated. A copyist, however, assimilating the Greek to this old 
Syriac text would naturally be led by the Syriac reading to omit the 
words ' and was carried up into heaven.' " 



124 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



will appear a conclusive argument for the position 
that the closing words of the Gospel are a record 
of the Ascension.* 

When from the Gospel we pass to the Acts we 
are confronted with no such questions as those 
with which we have just dealt. The narrative of 
the last interview between the Lord and the dis- 
ciples reaches its climax in the words (v. 9) : " And 
when he had said these things, as they were looking, 
he was taken up ; and a cloud received him out of 
their sight." We are so familiar with the passage 
that we are hardly conscious of its wonderful 
simplicity and restraint. The central Greek word 
— " he was taken up " — is derived from the story 
of Elijah's passing from earth (2 Kings ii. 9 ff, ; 
comp. Ecclus. xlviii. 9) ; but the contrast between 
the description of the Ascension of the Lord and 
that of the ascension of Elijah is very great. There 
is nothing in the former to correspond to the 
chariot of fire and horses of fire " and " the 
whirlwind " of the latter. The story is bare of any 
details which can justly be called mythical. The 
difficulty which it presents is essentially the same 
as the difficulty presented by the appearances 
and disappearances of the risen Lord recorded in 
the Gospels. If we grant that after the Resurrec- 
tion our Lord's body was (to use St. Paul's paradox) 
a " spiritual body," we have the key to a mystery 
which lies outside our present experience. 

* I have for a long time held, for purely literary reasons, that St. 
Luke wrote the Acts first and then the Gospel. When they were pub- 
lished, this order was necessarily reversed. I cherish the hope that 
some time 1 may be able to publish my reasons for this opinion. If it 
is sound, it obviously removes all difficulty in the relation of the story 
of the Ascension in the Gospel to that in the Acts. In the Gospel St. 
Luke tells briefly what he has already told at length. 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 125 



The allusions to an Ascension of the Lord found 
in the other books of the New Testament imply a 
knowledge of such a history as we actually .find in 
the two Lucan Books, or (if we still have any 
lingering doubts as to the significance of the 
closing verses of the Gospel) at least in the first 
chapter of the Acts. Such allusions require a 
justification : they receive a justification from the 
witness of St. Luke. There is doubtless more 
cogent evidence that the Lord did ascend than 
there is for the particular story of the Ascension 
which comes to us on the authority, tested as it is 
in many ways and approved, of the one historian. 
But it is not too much to say that the confession 
of the Creeds, the credal statements of Christian 
writers in the second century, the allusions in the 
New Testament, and, lastly, the story told us by 
St. Luke, are strictly in harmony with each other, 
and that together they form a solid and stable 
whole. 

It is now time that we should ask ourselves 
what (so far as our minds can apprehend) is the 
true character of the Ascension and what the true 
significance of the Session of the Lord Jesus at 
the right hand of God. 

It is probably impossible for us in our study of 
the momenta of the Lord's incarnate life to discern 
with anything like absolute accuracy what element 
in each is essential to it in its proper character and 
what element is (so to speak) superimposed that 
the whole transaction may be a revelation to men 
and speak to men in terms which they can under- 
stand. But we can hardly be greatly in error if 



126 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



we say that that which was outward and visible 
in the Ascension — the Lord was raised from the 
earth and hidden from view by the encircHng cloud 
— was not for His sake but for the sake of the 
Apostles and of those who should believe through 
their word. In no other way so far as we can see 
could the Apostles have been taught that their 
Master was for ever truly man, but that the days 
of His humiliation were now over and that hence- 
forth He was with the Father. For in truth 
" upwards " and " downwards," " ascent " and 
" descent," are terms relative to our common 
apprehension of things. The heaven which is 
above our heads is underneath the feet of our 
fellow-citizens in Australia. Let us — for in these 
things we are all children — make our appeal to 
the devotional language of children. 

" There's a Friend for little children 
Above the bright blue sky." 

To the little child the words suggest a clear image 
of the majesty and purity and blessedness in which 
God ever is. But the words are a necessary 
accommodation. We know that the Friend is 
not seated in a mysterious palace somewhere in 
space, but is at the little child's side, within the 
little child's heart, yet of infinite greatness and 
power and love. So, when we contemplate the 
Ascension we must guard ourselves against resting 
in any conception of a physical elevation as in 
itself a final and absolute truth. We may, I 
believe, fearlessly accept the Ascension (such an 
Ascension as is recorded by St. Luke) as an 
historical event, and find in the historical event a 



THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 127 



parable unfolding to us men a spiritual and divine 
truth about the Lord Jesus Christ. 

What the Church believes that spiritual and 
divine truth to be is expressed in the confession — 
He sitteth on the right hand of God the Father 
Almighty." Yet still the truth is set forth in a 
parable, but a parable not now of action but of 
words. The phrase, as we have already seen, is 
derived from what was written aforetime about the 
majesty and honour to which the son of the King 
of Israel was exalted. Already, it would seem 
probable, before our Lord appealed to the Psalm 
as He was teaching in the Temple (Mark xii. 35/.), 
the words had been invested with a meaning 
nobler and more sacred than that which belongs 
to anything of royal splendour. Their Messianic 
associations prepared them for the use to which 
the earliest preachers of the Gospel put them 
(comp. Acts ii. 34 ; Col. iii. 1 ; Eph. i. 20 ; Heb. i. 
13; viii. 1 ; x. 12; xii. 2). If we try to draw out 
the meaning of the parable in its new and highest 
context we shall probably agree that four great 
ideas are shadowed forth in it. These are a 
return to God ; rest ; leadership ; sovereignty. 

A return to God, So we must speak who can 
view the Incarnation only from its earthly side. 
The Incarnation to us seems to have broken for a 
time the perfect union and communion between 
the eternal Father and the eternal Son. To us 
therefore the Ascension appears to restore what 
for us men and for our salvation " had been 
taken away. 

Rest, Weariness, pain, *' acquaintance with 
grief," proximity to sin, nay whatever of humilia- 



128 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



tion might seem to linger still about the risen 
Christ when from time to time He appeared to 
His disciples in the likeness of a man — all this was 
openly declared to have been abolished for ever 
when the Lord's Ascension set its seal to the Lord's 
Resurrection. He is true man still ; but He is 
glorified. 

Leadership, Christ in His Resurrection was 
" the firstfruits " (1 Cor. xv. 20). There is some 
true sense in which He is " the first fruits " in His 
Ascension also, though we shrink from any attempt 
to give a clear and definite shape to the thought. 
But in many ways it finds expression in the New 
Testament ; " I go to prepare a place for you. 
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come 
again, and will receive you unto myself ; that 
where I am, there ye may be also " (John xiv. 
2 /.) ; Who shall fashion anew the body of our 
humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body 
of his glory" (Phil. iii. 21); "Whither as a fore- 
runner Jesus entered for us " (Heb. vi. 20) ; " He 
that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down 
with me in my throne, as I also overcame, and 
sat down with my Father in his throne " (Rev. 
iii. 21). Christ in His Ascension reveals the 
destiny of those who are in Christ." 

Sovereignty, This last idea has two aspects. 
(1) Some of the profoundest thoughts of the New 
Testament gather round the conception of the 
divine Word. As the divine Word Christ is the 
light of men," the Tutor of all, to use an image 
familiar in early Christian literature, so that every 
fragment of truth to which men cling, every 
aspiration, social and personal, which makes for 



THE ASCENSION OP JESUS CHRIST 129 



righteousness and charity and reverence, are not 
the product of their own unaided powers but are 
the very inspiration of the Word. Again, the 
Apostles, in words which at least from some points 
of view can be understood better to-day than 
when they were first written, unfold to us the 
mysterious thought that through the eternal 
Word all things were made, that in Him they are 
and in Him move onward towards their appointed 
goal (comp. Col. i. 15 ff. ; Heb. i. 2/. ; John i. 1 ff.). 
Now we may not think that these offices of the 
Eternal Word were suspended when He became 
flesh and dwelt as man among men. He was still 
the Word sown in the hearts and consciences of 
men, still the sustainer and goal of the universe. 
But in the days of His earthly sojourn, as we look 
on the picture of the Son of Man drawn for us in 
the Gospels, we can see only the signs of His self- 
emptying, of His lowliness, of His humble obedience 
even to the last issue of human weakness. It 
seems to us that during those years of earthly life 
and ministry the Lord's work in the universe and 
in the world of men must have been intermitted. 
The Ascension reassures us. When by an outward 
and visible act He left the world and went to the 
Father, He made it possible for His disciples to 
believe that essentially and eternally He bears 
on all things, all things in the sphere of human 
life, all things in the sphere of the world of nature, 
to their destined consummation. So we get a 
glimpse into the meaning of St. Paul's paradox 
(Eph. iv. 10) : He . . . ascended far above all 
the heavens, that he might fill all things " (comp. 
i. 23). (2) The thought of the Lord's supremacy 

I 



130 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



in the world of grace is in some sort familiar to us. 
In that great passage in which St. Paul unfolds 
the mystery of Christ the immediate sequel of the 
words " He raised him from the dead and made 
him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places" 
is found in the words "And gave him to be head 
over all things to the Church" (Eph. i. 20 ff.). 
We are living in " the days " (Matt, xxviii. 20) of 
the heavenly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
Our conception of that ministry includes all our 
thoughts about the present relation of the Lord 
Jesus Christ to all the members of His Body. 
But the truths which belong to a confession of His 
sovereignty in the Church are set forth in the 
later section of the Creed and demand sepai^ate 
treatment. It is enough for us, if it may have 
been so^ to penetrate a little way into the meaning 
of the Church's eucharistic hymn : 

" Thou only art holy ; Thou only art the Lord ; 
Thou only, 0 Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art 
most high in the glor}'- of God the Father." 



VIII 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 



*' From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead."- 

"^HE world has not seen the last of Jesus 



1 Christ our Lord. He was crucified, 
dead, and buried " ; but the third day He 
rose again." He ascended into heaven, and 
sitteth on the right hand of God " ; but " from 
thence He shall come to judge " mankind. All 
human history from the first appearance of man 
upon the earth until the Incarnation was a pre- 
paration for His first coming ; all human history 
from the Ascension to this day has been a pre- 
paration for His Eeturn. In " the fulness of the 
time " God sent forth His Son, born of a woman." 
When the time is full again, He will send Him 
forth again in the glory of the Father. '' We 
believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge." 

We speak of two comings of oiu: Lord. There 
have been, and there are, many comings of the 
Son of God to the world. We believe that the 
Eternal Word came forth from the bosom of 
the Father to create. All things were made through 
Him, things on earth and things in heaven, things 
visible and invisible. The true Light which 
lighteth every man is ever entering human life. 
Life, so far as it is progress, is the growing mani- 
festation of His presence. In an especial manner 




132 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



He came to His own people Israel, guiding and 
shaping their national life by law and prophecy. 
That Israel disregarded His voice, that the world 
He had made failed to recognise His Presence, 
does not lessen the wonder of the fact. To the 
Church, the new Israel, He comes still by His 
Spirit, in His Sacraments, in the life of the Body 
and of each of its true members. But of the many 
comings of our Lord two stand out pre-eminently, 
and from the earliest Christian times these have 
been known as the First and Second Advents 
the coming in the flesh and the coming in glory. 
It is the latter of these in which Jesus Christ will be 
manifested as Judge. 

Of a glorious Return our Lord spoke freely and 
often during the later months of His ministry in 
Galilee. He began to speak of it as soon as He 
began to speak of His approaching death — ^that is, 
just before the Transfiguration. " From that 
time," as we read in St. Matthew (xvi. 21), " began 
Jesus to shew unto His disciples how that He must 
be killed, and the third day be raised up." But 
He did not stop there. ''The Son of Man," He 
added, apparently on the same occasion, " shall 
come in the glory of His Father, with His angels, 
and then shall He render unto every man according 
to his deeds."! Thenceforth the thought of His 
Return finds frequent expression in our Lord's 
utterances, especially in the parables. The Good 
Samaritan will repay what is spent for him, when 
he comes back again (Luke x. 35). The disciples 

• 

* See Justin's Dialogue, 52. 

t This saying is reported in almost identical words by the three 
Synoptists (Matt, xvl 27 ; Mark viii= 38 ; Luke viii. 26). 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 133 



are to be as men who look for their Lord when He 
shall return from His journey (Luke xii. 36) ; as 
virgins that go forth to meet the bridegroom ; as 
servants, who when the master comes back will be 
called to account for their use of the talents 
entrusted to them (Matt. xxv. 1-12, 14-30). We 
even have a vivid description of the judgment 
scene, which represents the Son of Man as sitting on 
His throne, with all the nations gathered round 
Him to receive His award of life or death (Matt, 
xxv. 31-46). St. Matthew places this scene im- 
mediately before the history of the Passion, and 
it is clear from other Synoptic references to the 
Return that the Lord's mind dwelt increasingly 
upon it as the time of His death drew near. When 
the Return should take place, whether it should 
follow immediately after His departure or be long 
delayed, is not made clear ; the time of the Advent 
did not lie within His human knowledge (Mark xiii. 
32). But that it should come, sooner or later. He 
had no doubt ; the second coming was as certain 
to Him as the crucifixion and the rising from the 
dead. 

Such sayings may have been little understood 
at the time by those who heard them, but after the 
Ascension they were remembered, and their signi- 
ficance was realised. Even as He ascended, a 
vision of angels turned the thoughts of the Eleven 
to His coming again. As the days went on, this 
hope expressed itself in glowing words which sought 
to describe the scene of the Return. " The Lord 
Himself," writes St. Paul in one of his earliest 
Epistles, "shall descend from heaven with a shout, 
with the voice of the archangel and with the trump 



134 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



of God" (1 Thess. iv. 16). ''Behold/' exclaims 
the prophet of the Apocalypse, in the last years of 
the first century, " He cometh with clouds, and 
every eye shall see Him " (Rev. i. 7). In the 
ecstasy of her new life the primitive Church looked 
for the fulfilment of this great hope within the 
Apostolic Age. " The coming of the Lord," she 
said, "is at hand ; the Judge standeth before the 
doors " (James v. 8, 9). " We that are alive 
. . . are left unto the coming of the Lord " 
(1 Thess. iv. 15). Her watchword was Mar an atlm 
(1 Cor. xvi. 22) — "the Lord cometh," or perhaps 
"the Lord come." "Amen, come. Lord Jesus," 
is her last word at the end of the New Testament 
canon (Rev. xxii. 20). This expectation of an 
imminent Return died with the first century, but 
the assured hope of a Return lived on, and reflects 
itself in all the Creeds of Christendom. The first 
generation enshrined it in a series of Greek words, 
which it borrowed from the common speech of the 
time and consecrated to the service of the Faith. 
The second coming of the Lord was called the 
" Parousia " or Advent — a word used for the visit 
of a Roman emperor or high official to the distant 
parts of the Empire ; the " Epiphany " or Appear- 
ing ; the "Apocalypse" or Revelation of Jesus 
Christ.* Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of 
Lords, was coming to visit the earth. He would 
manifest Himself to men in the full glory of the 
Divine Manhood. He would drop the veil, which 
since the Ascension has hidden Him from the eyes 
of men, and stand revealed before the world. 

To the question : For what purpose will He 

* See Milligan on Thessalonians, p. 145 ff. 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 135 



come ? the Apostolic Church had more than one 
answer. He is coming to receive His people to 
Himself, that where He is, in the Father's House, 
they may be also (John xiv. 5). He is coming to 
take to Himself His Bride, the Church, that she 
may share His life with God (Eph. v. 27 ; Bev. xix. 
7 f., xxi. 2 ff.). He will come to complete the work 
of redemption by the resurrection of the body and 
its rehabilitation after the fashion of His own 
glorified manhood (Rom. viii. 23 ; 1 Cor. xv. 42 ff. ; 
Phil. iii. 21). He will come to restore all things ; 
to regenerate Nature, which is at length to be 
delivered from the bondage of decay and the 
frustration of its purpose (Matt. xix. 28 ; Acts iii. 
21 ; Rom. viii. 19 ff. ; Rev. xxi. 5) ; to receive the 
subjection of all things to Himself, and so to 
complete His work as Mediator and bring in the 
great consummation when God shall be all in all 
(1 Cor. XV. 24-28). All these ends of our Lord's 
Second Coming went to make up the fullness of the 
hope which the first age connected with His Return. 
The Creed, however, which limits itself to a few 
essential articles of belief, passes them over, and 
fixes attention upon a purpose of the Advent which 
for the world in general is the most important and 
interesting. He shall come to judge the quick 
and the dead." 

When Jesus Christ was on earth He steadily 
refused the office of judge. It was then no part 
of His Messianic work. " Who made Me a judge 
or a divider over you ? " (Luke xii. 13) was His 
answer to one who invited Him to decide a question 
of property. Hath no man condemned thee ? 
neither do I condemn thee," He is reported to have 



136 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



said to an adulteress brought to Him for judgment 
(John viii. 11) — not that He condoned adultery, 
but because He had no authority to pronounce 
sentence. To judge was not the purpose of the 
First Coming. " God sent not the Son into the 
world to judge the world, but that the world should 
be saved through Him " (John iii. 17). " I judge 
no man," Jesus said on another occasion, though 
He could add : " If I judge. My judgment is true " 
(John viii. 15 f.). And again : " If any man hear 
My sayings and keep them not, I judge him not, 
for I came not to judge the world, but to save the 
world " (John xii. 47). Yet the Fourth Gospel, 
which contains these strong disclaimers of judicial 
authority, contains also our Lord's most distinct 
claim to be the future Judge of men. The 
Father hath given all judgment unto the Son . . . 
He gave Him authority to execute judgment, 
because He is the Son of Man. . . . The hour 
cometh in which all that are in the tombs shall hear 
His voice and shall come forth ; they that have 
done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they 
that have done evil, unto the resurrection of 
judgment " (John v. 22, 27 f.). 

In one sense judgment is always going forward 
in life and in history. The daily conduct of men 
is a daily judgment, for it automatically divides 
them by a moral grouping which goes to determine 
their ultimate place in the Kingdom of God. It 
forms character and habit, which will supply the 
basis of final judgment. To this extent the First 
Advent brought judgment, though its purpose 
was not to judge but to save ; for it revealed the 
true character of all who came into contact with 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 137 



the Incarnate Life. " Thoughts out of many 
hearts " were " revealed " (Luke ii. 35) by their 
attitude towards Jesus Christ. " He that believeth 
on Him," as St. John writes, " is not judged ; he 
that beheveth not hath been judged already, 
because he hath not believed on the name of the 
only-begotten Son of God ; and this is the judgment, 
that the Light is come into the world, and men 
loved the darkness rather than the Light " (John 
iii. 18 ff.). Thus, notwithstanding His refusal of 
judicial authority, our Lord could say : " For 
judgment came I into this world " (John ix. 39) ; 
and again, when the Crucifixion was at hand : 
" Now is there a judgment of this world " (John xii. 
31). Such a judicial process will continue to be a 
result of the Incarnation and Atonement as long 
as the world lasts and Christ is preached. Men 
determine their own spiritual position by the 
response which they make to the appeal of Christ 
and His Church. 

All this progressive judgment of man will find 
its consummation at a future day. Of a " Day of 
Judgment " the Gospel of St. Matthew speaks more 
than once (Matt. xi. 15, 22, 24 ; xii. 36). The 
phrase, which comes from the Greek Old Testament 
(Isaiah xxxiv. 8), may stand for any time of trial 
which sifts men or nations and reveals their moral 
character ; but in Christian use it becomes a title 
for the time of the Second Advent (1 John iv. 17 ; 
2 Peter ii. 9 ; iii. 7). This is also called the Great 
Day, the Day of the Lord, the Day of Christ (Jude 
6 ; 1 Peter iii. 10 ; Phil. ii. 16), in contrast with 
" man's day " (1 Cor. iv. 3), the present 
order, in which men and things are judged 



138 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



according to merely human standards of right 
and wrong. 

Imagination fails to paint the Great Assize of 
that day, even with the help of the symbolical 
descriptions which the New Testament supplies. 
Who can realise the gathering of all the generations 
of mankind before the glorified Christ, the nature of 
the scrutiny by which the secrets of all hearts shall 
be laid bare, the unerring justice of the verdict 
which will determine the result of all lives, the 
power which will make the sentence effective ? The 
mind is staggered by the effort to grasp conditions 
to which our present life holds nothing analogous. 
In human courts of justice each case is heard 
separately, and the judgment is based on evidence 
which is elicited often with the greatest difficulty 
and which, when complete, may leave much to the 
summing up of the judge and the impression made 
by counsel on the minds of the jury. But before 
the Divine Tribunal all mankind will appear, and 
yet each individual will receive absolute justice. 
" I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing 
before the Throne, and books were opened ; and 
they were judged every man according to their 
works " (Rev. xx. 12 f.). All the great men of 
history — kings and conquerors, statesmen and 
legislators, poets, philosophers, artists, men of 
letters, men of science — ^will be there, and with 
them the vast forgotten majority who " have no 
memorial," who to their fellow-men " are perished 
as though they had not been " (Ecclus. xliv. 9). 

All are known to God, for all live unto Him " 
(Luke XX. 38) ; all will receive equal attention ; 
all will find the precise place for which their previous 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 139 



lives have fitted them. None are too great to 
stand before that Tribunal ; none too insignificant. 
" Say not thou, I shall be hidden from the Lord, 
and who shall remember me from on high ? I shall 
not be known among so many people ; for what is 
my soul in a boundless creation ? " (Ecclus. xvi. 
17). Alive at the coming of the Lord, or already 
for thousands of years among the dead, all human 
beings v/ill appear at the final reckoning and be 
individually tried and sentenced. Jesus Christ is 
" ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and 
dead " (Acts x. 42 ; 2 Tim. iv. 1). " We shall not 
all sleep " {{.e, die), " but we shall all be changed " 
(1 Cor. XV. 51) ; the living will undergo a trans- 
formation analogous to that which restores the 
dead to life ; so that, living or dead, we may all 
stand together before the judgment seat of Christ. 

One question calls for an answer at this point. 
The New Testament everywhere represents the 
Lord's Return as an object of joyful hope for the 
Church. Yet the prospect of standing before 
the Supreme Judge is suggestive of awe or terror, 
rather than of hope and joy. Is it then to be 
supposed that the faithful members of the Church 
will be exempt from judgment ? Will the Church 
stand looking on while the world is being judged ? 
These are passages in the New Testament, which, 
taken by themselves, may seem to support this 
view. " He that believeth on the Son," St. John 
writes, " is not being judged " (John iii. 18) ; such 
an one, our Lord Himself teaches, " cometh not 
into judgment, but hath passed out of death into 
life " (John v. 24). St. Paul even speaks of the 
members of Christ as His future assessors in 



140 THE MEANING OF THE CREED - 



judgment (1 Cor. vi. 2 f.). But against the first 
impression which is created by words such as these 
we must set explicit statements that the judgment 
will be universal. The Great Master comes to 
reckon with all His servants, the good and faithful 
as well as the wicked and slothful ; the sheep pass 
under the eye of the Shepherd as well as the goats. 
" We shall all stand " (St. Paul writes to the 
Roman Christians) " before the judgment seat of 
God ; each one of us shall give account of himself 
to God " (Rom. xiv. 10 ff.). The Apostle does not 
hold himself exempt : " He that judgeth me is the 
Lord " (1 Cor. iv. 4) ; "we must all be made mani- 
fest before the judgment seat of Christ, that each 
one may receive the things done in the body " 
(2 Cor. V. 10). The faithful servant of Christ does 
not come into judgment in the sense that he is left 
in doubt of his acceptance ; he comes to receive 
from the righteous Judge the crown of righteousness, 
which the Lord will give to those who have loved 
His appearing (2 Tim. iv. 8). Nevertheless he will 
be judged by the same unfailing truth and justice 
as the rest of mankind ; there is no respect of 
persons with the Judge of all. There is enough of 
awfulness in the whole prospect to sober life, to 
induce watchfulness and diligence; but there is 
nothing in it to cloud the brightness of the hope 
with which the Church looks for the coming of her 
Lord. 

Belief in a judgment after death is not peculiar 
to the Church. The doctrine that the actions of 
men will at some future time pass under review 
and receive an appropriate recompense, has been, 
in one form or another, widely held by pre-Christian 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 141 



and non-Christian peoples. Both conscience and 
reason assent to it. The Roman procurator, FeHx, 
whose violent and corrupt administration drew 
upon him the censure of a heathen historian, " was 
terrified " when his prisoner, Paul, reasoned of the 
judgment to come (Acts xxiv. 25). His conscience, 
hardened as it was, bore witness to the truth of the 
Apostle's words. There is at times in the very 
heathen, as the same Apostle suggests, something 
like a rehearsal of the last assize, " their thoughts, 
one with another, accusing or else excusing them" 
(Rom. ii. 15) ; witnesses within them are already 
giving evidence, as they will do with overwhelming 
power when the great Day comes. Reason, too, 
concurs with conscience, demanding that some 
great review shall be made of human conduct. 
Life, as we see it, is full of miscarriages of justice. 
Vice is not always punished, nor is virtue always 
rewarded while men are here. And looking back 
over the pages of history we learn that it has always 
been so ; there has never been hitherto any settling 
of the long account, which nevertheless loudly calls 
for settlement, if the world is under the government 
of a righteous God. No Theist can resist the con- 
clusion that a day of reckoning is yet to come ; the 
unavenged crimes of thousands of years, the for- 
gotten sins of millions of lives, await the coming 
of a Supreme Judge. The world, or each life that 
goes to make up the sum of human accountability, 
must some day be judged in righteousness. When 
St. Paul preached this doctrine on the Areopagus, 
it excited, so far as we know, no opposition either 
from Stoics or Epicureans ; they mocked when he 
spoke of a resurrection, but the thought of a future 



142 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



judgment excited no ridicule. There was in their 
deepest convictions something that responded to 
it, whatever their philosophical creeds might have 
led them to say. The principle of a Divine Judg- 
ment of the world and of individual men has 
always appealed to the reason as well as to the 
conscience of the majority of thoughtful men.* 

The expectation of a future judgment, then, 
belongs to natural religion. But to this expectation 
Christianity gives definitd^ness and certainty ; it 
assigns a Day for the Judgment, it names the Judge. 
Jesus Christ, it says, is the Judge, and He will 
judge the world in the day of His Second Coming. 

Men are to be judged by Man. This is an 
original feature in the Christian creed, and one 
which, if it excites interest and hope, also raises not 
a few difficulties. On the one hand, we feel the 
appropriateness of One Who is Himself " Son of 
Man " being entrusted with the work of judging 
His fellow-men. He will understand their nature ; 
He will be in sympathy with its sinless infirmities ; 
He will know the strength of its temptations, for He 
Himself has been tempted in all points like as 
we are. There is infinite kindness and love towards 
man shown in the delegation to Jesus Christ of all 
judgment, on the ground that He is Son of Man. 
On the other hand, the limitations of human nature 
seem to render the fulfilment of such a task by man 
impossible. How can man read the secrets of all 
hearts ? How can a human mind, however 
gigantic its intellectual strength, deal with the vast 

* A useful summary of non- Christian opinion on this subject may be 
seen in Hastings' Encyclopcedia of Beligion and Ethics, s.v. Eschatology 
(v. p. 373 ff.). 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 143 



mass of evidence, the infinite intricacies of life, the 
compHcations arising from the influence of life on 
life, of one generation on another ; the immense 
crowd of circumstances which, even in the case of a 
single life, go to decide the measure of guilt or of 
goodness ; the maze of calculations necessary to 
determine the exact award which each case requires ? 
The Incarnation alone can supply any approach to a 
solution of this problem. Even in the brief records 
of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, we observe signs 
that He possessed unique powers of reading 
character at a glance ; from the beginning of His 
ministry He made it plain to those about Him that 
" He knew all men, and needed not that any one 
should bear witness concerning man, for He Him- 
self knew what was in man " (John ii. 24 f ). Of the 
powers of the glorified Christ, Who sits at the 
right hand of God, and comes in the glory of the 
Father, we can form no conception.* But it may 
well be believed that, when the world stands 
before Him to be judged. He will need none to bear 
witness concerning any of the countless lives with 
which He has to deal. " I am He," the Ascended 
Christ has told us, " which searcheth the reins and 
the heart " (Rev. ii. 23). Behind the glorified 
manhood, and working through it, is the personal 
Word, Who, even more than the impersonal 
revelation of God in Scripture and in conscience, 
" pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit," 
and is " quick " be^^ond all human experience 
" to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart " 
(Heb. iv. 12). 

* The reader may refer to Bishop Weston's The One Christ, p. 287 £f.; 
for some useful remarks on this point. 



144 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



But, it may be said, God is Himself the One 
Judge of men. So the Old Testament repeatedly 
teaches (Gen. xviii. 25 ; Ps. 1. 6 ; Ixxv. 7 ; xeiv. 2), 
and the Apostolic writers recognise this (Kom. 
xiv. 10 ff. ; probably, also, Rev. xx. 11). Judg- 
ment, universal and final, is a prerogative of God. 
There would seem to be no more elementary truth, 
and yet our Lord distinctly teaches that " the 
Father judgeth no man, but He hath given all 
judgment unto the Son " (John v. 22). " Who 
can forgive sins but one, even God ? " the scribes 
rightly asked ; and yet it is the Son of Man who 
has power on earth to forgive sins (Mark ii. 7, 10). 
So also to the Son of Man is committed the Divine 
prerogative of judgment. Since the Incarnation 
this world is in the hands of a Mediator, and to Him 
all authority is given so long as the period of 
mediation lasts. The Judgment is the last act in 
this devolution of Divine prerogatives to the 
Incarnate Son ; with it the Kingdom of the 
Mediator ceases, merged in the eternal reign of God. 
It is God Who will judge the secrets of men, but He 
will judge them by Jesus Christ (Rom. ii. 16). 

A few words must be added on the sentences 
which the Judge will pronounce, for these, too, 
have been revealed to us, although they are not 
named in the Creed. The Judge Himself ends His 
description of the judgment scene with the appalling 
words, " These " (the condemned) " shall go away 
into eternal punishment, but the righteous into 
eternal life." This is not the place to consider the 
meaning of " eternal " in such a connection, or of 
punishment " and " life " ; a discussion of these 
words would lead us too far afield, and carry us 



JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 145 



into regions of thought which the human mind, as 
it is at present constituted, cannot explore. But 
there is one feature which is common to all the New 
Testament descriptions of the future judgment, 
and which challenges our attention. It is the 
sharp dividing line which is to be drawn by the 
Judge, on one side of which, or on the other, all 
human beings must ultimately find themselves. 
In life, as we know it, there is no such clearly 
marked line between good and evil, and no tests 
which we can apply would place one part of man- 
kind on the right hand, and the rest on the left. 
Most living men seem to us to be on the border, or 
on neutral ground, neither wholly good nor wholly 
bad, or fluctuating from day to day between the 
two opposite sides. Even when a life is ended, and 
we read a careful review of it in a published memoir 
or in history, we often hesitate to pronounce 
judgment of complete condemnation or complete 
approval. But the Supreme Judge, as it appears, 
will not hesitate, will find none to whom justice and 
truth can assign an intermediate place between the 
saved and the lost. He possesses a knowledge of 
the secrets of the heart which is denied to us ; tests 
of character will be at His disposal which we cannot 
apply. Moreover, the fluctuations of motive and 
purpose which exist here will have ceased ; before 
the end each man will have definitely taken his 
side, and the Judge will but confirm the sentence 
which the soul has, in fact, passed upon itself. 

Other difficulties, admitting only of a partial 
solution, may occur to the mind as it contemplates 
the Christian doctrine of the judgment to come. 
But intellectual perplexities will not disturb the 

K 



146 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



faith of the thoughtful Christian ; he recognises 
them, but they leave his behef unshaken. It would 
surprise him if an event so remote from all present 
experience presented no difficulties but such as the 
limited powers of man's understanding were able to 
solve. He does not profess to understand all the 
contents of his Creed, which, resting on a basis of 
historical facts, runs up into m^^steries which are 
as yet unexplained. He waits for the future to 
reveal man}^ things which for the present he is 
content to believe. 

Meanwhile, the practical effect of belief in 
Jesus Christ as Judge is not weakened by the 
impossibility of realising the scene, or analj^sing 
the contents of our faith. Faith in the return of 
our Lord as the Judge of quick and dead changes 
the whole tenor of the present life. It lifts up 
common work and intercourse into the presence of 
Christ.* It ennobles all the service of the world by 
inspiring it with the hope of the Master's approval ; 
it encourages vigilance, thoroughness, faithfulness. 
For believers the Tribunal of Christ stands at the 
end of all their ways, and imparts to lif^ a solemn 
joy which at once chastens and brightens their years 
on earth. " We make it our aim whether at home 
or absent," whether we shall be found among the 
dead or the living when He comes, "to be well- 
pleasing unto Him," our Saviour and our Judge. 
We seek to " abide in Him, that, if He shall be 
manifested, w^e may have boldness, and not be 
ashamed before Him at His coming " (2 Cor. v. 9 ; 
1 John ii. 28). 

* Christians "talk as men who know that the Lord hears thern " 
(Tertullian, Apology, ch, 39). 



IX 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 

" I believe in the Holy Ghost." 

BELIEF in the Holy Ghost dommates the third 
great paragraph of the Cliristian Creed ; 
on it depend all the Articles which assert belief 
in the Church and the forgiveness of sins and 
immortality ; it is clearly of fundamental import- 
ance for Christian faith. If we would under- 
stand it aright there are three points with which 
we must deal: (1) How did belief in the Holy 
Spkit arise ? (2) How did it develop ? (3) 
What does it mean ? 

1. — How DID Belief in the Holy Spirit 

ARISE ? 

The Christian Church has always based its 
theology on facts, and there are certain definite, 
historical facts at the basis of its belief in the Holy 
Spirit. What are they ? 

They are facts in the actual experience of the 
Apostles of our Lord and of other primitive 
Christians, facts which in the last resort can only 
be accounted for by the emergence of a new 
spiritual power at work in the lives of men, the 
power which they called " The Holy Spkit." 

To see what these facts are we must concentrate 



148 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



our attention first on the problem presented by 
tliose seven weeks which are and must remain the 
most momentous in the history of mankind, the 
seven weeks which elapsed between that Passover 
on the eve of which J esus was crucified for claiming 
to be the Messiah, and that Pentecost on the 
morning of which St. Peter preached the first 
Christian sermon. 

The Feast of Passover begins with the disciples 
hiding in terror of their lives, disillusioned, hope- 
less, faithless : their Master executed for blasphemy, 
dead and buried : He who should have redeemed 
Israel overwhelmed with failure and disgrace, 
forsaken and rejected, as it seemed, alike by man 
and by God. The Feast of Pentecost finds those 
same disciples publicly repeating that very claim 
that Jesus was the Messiah, which, when He Him- 
self had made it, had caused His death. It was 
St. Peter, whose cowardice had denied all know- 
ledge of Jesus when He was on trial, who now 
proclaimed, " Let all the house of Israel know 
assuredly that God hath made this same Jesus 
whom ye crucified both Lord and Christ." At the 
Passover all was darkness and despair ; at Pente- 
cost all was confidence and light. 

How are we to account for this amazing 
contrast ? The Apostles' conviction that the cru- 
cified Jesus was the exalted Messiah remains a 
psychological enigma, inexplicable, unless we can 
assume as its cause an objective, historical fact, as 
objective and historical as the Crucifixion itself, 
a fact which persuaded His disciples that Jesus 
was alive after His death. Such a fact was the 
Resurrection, of which tradition assures us they 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 149 



became aware on the morning next but one after 
His burial. 

But why, if they knew of the Resurrection so 
soon, did the Apostles wait seven weeks before 
proclaiming it to the world ? If we study the 
accounts of that interval which have come down to 
us, we discover good reasons for the delay : not 
only did it take time to convince the disciples of 
Jesus' Resurrection, but, more important still, when 
they were convinced of it they were also convinced 
that they were not yet adequately fitted to proclaim 
it. They must wait till they were endued with 
" power from on high " ; so they learnt from their 
experience of the Risen Christ Himself. 

At length the Resurrection Appearances cul- 
minated in one which impressed them with the 
sense of its finality, and of the completeness of their 
Master's triumph — the Appearance known to 
Church tradition as the Ascension. Convinced 
that they were entrusted with the duty of pro- 
claiming Him as Lord and Saviour, about a 
hundred and twenty disciples gathered in Jeru- 
salem under the leadership of the Apostles ; there 
they waited for their opportunity and the power 
to use it. 

With the Feast of Pentecost the opportunity 
arrived ; it was now or never ; and with the 
opportunity came the expected power : as a 
rushing mighty wind, as a fire that blazed from 
heaven, it was upon them ; it lit up their minds to 
see the real meaning of all that Jesus had taught 
and done, the true significance of His sufferings 
and His triumph ; it compelled them to proclaim 
with burning eloquence all that they had learnt of 



150 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



the mighty works of God ; and from that day 
onwards it dominated their lives and actions. 

God had sent into their hearts through Jesus 
Christ a Power not of this world : only such a 
power could achieve what history assures us was 
achieved by those early Christians. By its com- 
pelling influence they found themselves welded 
together into a religious and social community, a 
fellowship of faith and hope and love, the true 
Israel, the Church of the living God. Enabled 
to become daily more and more like Jesus, they 
developed an ever fuller comprehension of His 
unique significance ; and so they went about 
carrying on the work and teaching which He had 
begun on earth, certain that He was with them and 
energising in them. They healed the sick in mind 
and body, they convinced Jewish and Pagan 
consciences of sin and its forgiveness, they created 
a new morality, and established a new hope ; life 
and immortality were brought to light. And then, 
as need arose, they were inspired to write those 
books of the New Testament, in which their 
wonderful experience of God at work in them 
remains enshrined, the norm and standard of 
Christian faith and practice for all time. 

The Power which enabled them to do all this 
they called the Holy Spirit. For the first Christians 
the Holy Spirit signified no mere theological 
concept, but a potent actuality of everyday 
experience, alive and active, with all the force and 
vitality of a living person. Just as they could no 
longer think of God except as they now knew Him 
revealed as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, so 
they could no longer think of the Son of God except 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 151 



as they now knew Him in and through the working 
of the Holy Spirit. Father, Son and Holy Spirit 
were inseparable in their thoughts of God. 

II. — The Development of the Doctrine gi? 
THE Spirit 

The word which we translate as " Spirit " had 
already had a long history. First it had been used 
by the primitive Hebrews for the breath of man, 
and the wind of heaven, both of them mysterious 
forces of life and motion beyond human control ; 
and then it was used to describe such instances of 
strength and skill, of wisdom and sanctity, as 
seemed so far beyond the normal scope of human 
capacities as to be explicable only as the work of 
some Divine agency ; in the words and deeds of 
men so remarkably endowed the Jews believed 
they saw the breath — that is, the actual vital force 
— of God Himself, energising in and through men. 
The later Jewish Church recognised in the inspira- 
tion of the great prophets the highest manifestation 
of the Spirit's working yet seen, but the prophets 
themselves pointed forward to a yet fuller out- 
pouring of His power ; when the Messiah came, 
not only would He Himself be supremely endowed 
with the Spirit, but as a result of His coming His 
people one and all would experience such an out- 
pouring of His influence as had never before been 
known. 

It was this great expectation which the Apostles 
of Jesus declared had been at length fulfilled. It 
was well known, they said, that God had anointed 
Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with 
power " ; and the early accounts of our Lord's 



152 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



earthly ministry give us a vivid picture of one in 
whom the Spirit moved mightily ; at His baptism 
He had a vision of the Spirit descending upon Him ; 
immediately afterwards the Spirit " drives " Him 
into the wilderness to face the great temptation ; 
" in the power of the Spirit " He begins to preach ; 
by the same power He claims to cast out devils ; 
and in a moment of sublime exaltation He is 
described as " rejoicing in the Holy Spirit." Just 
before His death He tells His disciples that when 
they, like their Master before them, find themselves 
confronted by the authorities of a hostile world, 
they will discover that this same Holy Spirit they 
see working in His ministry is working also in 
theirs : " it is not ye that speak, but the Holy 
Spirit." 

And the Acts of the Apostles is the record of 
how this promise came true : it begins with the 
Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, to which the 
Apostles point as clear and immediate proof of 
the Messiahship of Jesus ; and throughout the rest 
of the book the Holy Spirit dominates the story. 
Not only the characters and exploits of individual 
believers, but the corporate acts and decisions of 
the Church are controlled by His inspiration ; the 
leading motive of the narrative is nothing else 
than this : that what Jesus had begun to do and 
teach in His earthly ministry He now, in His 
heavenly exaltation, continues and develops 
through His disciples by the agency of the Holy 
Spirit. The Acts has well been called " The 
Gospel of the Holy Spirit." 

The letters of St. Paul give us an even more 
vivid picture of the direct action of the Spirit in 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



153 



early Christian experience. Like a number of 
his fellow Christians then and since at times of 
great religious crisis and " revival," he found 
himself possessed of certain abnormal psychical 
capacities, such as the faculty for " seeing visions " 
and speaking with tongues." But, whereas his 
converts were all too ready to value most highly 
those " spiritual gifts," which seemed to them 
}nost thrilling and inexplicable, he valued most 
highly those which contributed most to the 
building of the Christian community, and chief 
among them he set faith and hope and love. 

The presence of the Spirit in men's hearts, he 
teaches, sets them free ; no longer enslaved by the 
letter of the law, they find themselves capable of 
leading an entirely new kind of life, the dominant 
characteristics of which are " love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 
meekness, self-control." These are none other 
than the characteristics of the perfect humanity 
of Christ, and it is precisely in this constant ability 
of believing Christians to lead a Christ-like life 
that St. Paul sees the supreme function of God's 
Spirit operating in men. The Spirit enables men, 
here and now, to share in the heavenly life of the 
risen Christ, setting them free from the power of 
sin and death, and ensuring them an immortality 
of Christlikeness. 

The Fourth Gospel interprets our Lord's life 
and teaching, as given in the earlier records, in the 
light of half a century's experience of Christianity. 
For St. John, no less than the earlier New Testament 
writers, the Holy Spirit is not an abstract idea, 
but a living force, the very life-breath of the 



154 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



ever-living Christ, breathed into His disciples as the 
climax of His redemptive work. So profoundly 
impressed is this Evangelist with the welj in which 
the Spirit's operation in the Christian Church 
sm^passes all that has ever been before, that, 
speaking of the days of om^ Lord's earthly ministry, 
he actually saj^s, " The Spirit was not yet." This 
does not impty that God's Spirit has not always^ 
been at work among men, but that the Incarnatiori 
heralds a new stage of spiritual manifestation, in 
the splendour of which all that has preceded it 
fades into insignificance. For in the Coming of 
the Spirit the Son HimseK retm^ns to dwell as an 
inward power in men's lives, and with the Son the 
Father also ; it follows that to have the Spirit 
means to have fellowship with the Father and the 
Son, that is, to be drawn into the very life of 
the Eternal God. And so the Spirit is called the 
" Paraclete," or " Comforter," a title which signifies 
that He comes to our aid, to be our counsel and 
defence, a Divine adviser and strengthener, who, 
now that the Son's visible presence is withdrawn, 
takes His place. Essentially the Spirit of Truth 
and Realit}^, He opens men's e^^es to see the Divine 
Realit}^ as it has been revealed in the Son. By 
bringing to their remembrance what the Son had 
taught while on earth, and b}^ unfolding its inner- 
most meaning, He explains, re-interprets, and 
applies to the ever-changing needs and conditions 
of the growing Church the teaching of the historical 
Jesus. He will abide with the disciples for ever, 
not merely during the age of the Apostles, in order 
to declare to them things as they are coming." 
The men who wTote such things about the 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



155 



Spirit did so because they knew them to be true. 
Their interest was practical rather than theoretical : 
they were concerned not so much to construct a 
complete and scientific system of Christian theology 
as to describe and impart to others an intense and 
vivid personal experience of an astonishing kind. 
The New Testament brings us into touch with men 
who had known a unique Personality ; they were 
cjonvinced that the one thing that supremely 
mattered was that the character of Jesus Christ, 
His thoughts about God and man, and sin and 
happiness, His purity. His love, His self-sacrifice, 
Pihould be reproduced in as many human beings as 
possible, that the richness of His amazing vitality 
should pass into and transform their lives. They 
knew that this was no idle dream, but a glorious 
possibility, because it was happening in themselves ; 
and the Divine Power that was bringing it about 
they worshipped and glorified as the Holy Spirit, 
the Lord, the Life-giver. 

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit did not parti- 
cularly occupy the attention of the Church's 
theologians till His Deity was challenged by the 
Arians in the fourth century. As that great 
controversy developed it became clear that belief 
in the Spirit was vitally affected by belief in the 
Son : the Arians who denied that Jesus Christ was 
" very God of very God, of one substance with the 
Father," began to assert that the Holy Spirit was 
little more than the influence of Christ's example, 
a gift to men, a thing created, in no sense an 
essential reality in the eternal life of God Himself. 
Athanasius and those who thought with him 
answered in effect that if Christ, the Son of God, be 



156 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



indeed of the very substance of the Godhead, no 
less Divine than the Father Himself, the Holy Spirit, 
through whose agency the Divine Son is conveyed 
into the lives and hearts of the faithful, cannot be 
less Divine than He Whom He conveys, and is there- 
fore also of the very substance of the Godhead : 
Father, Son and Spirit, one God. They had on 
their side not only logic, but the sense of Scripture 
and Church tradition ; above all, the general 
religious experience of Christendom supported 
them and not their opponents. Consequently 
when, at the Second General Council at Constanti- 
nople, the Church finally rejected Arianism, and 
reaffirmed the Nicene Creed, it also sanctioned a 
second form of Creed, containing these words about 
the Holy Ghost : " And I believe in the Holy Ghost, 
the Lord and Giver of life, Who proceedeth from the 
Father, Who with the Father and the Son together 
is worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the 
prophets." 

It is a w^ell-known fact that one of the reasons 
why Western Christendom under the Popes finally 
broke off from the Orthodox Churches of the East 
in 1054 was the insertion into this Creed of the 
word " Filioqiie'' (=:="and from the Son") after 
the words Who proceedeth from the Father." 
The Easterns regard this as an unauthorised 
tampering with an inviolable formula ; the actual 
theological point in dispute was a matter of terms 
rather than of doctrine; charity and good will 
would have discovered that both sides were in 
essential agreement, had not ecclesiastical rivalry 
driven out charity and good will. Pope and 
Patriarch really excommunicated each other 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 157 



because they were rivals for the Sovereignty of 
Christendom : there is a tragic fitness in the fact 
that as a cloak for their ambitions they used a 
dispute about the nature of the Spirit of Love and 
Unity. 

III. — What does Belief m the Holy 
Spirit mean ? 

We have traced in bare outline the course of 
experience and of thought about experience which 
has led the Christian Church to include belief in the 
Holy Spirit among the fundamental articles of its 
Creed. We have seen that this belief originated 
in certain concrete, historical occurrences, which 
demanded an explanation. The doctrine of the 
Holy Spirit was founded on fact ; it Avas not the 
outcome of abstract theological speculation. Yet 
for the majority of Christians to-day it seems to be 
little better than an abstruse and unintelligible 
formula, far removed from the practical necessities 
of everyday life. If it is to become for us of the 
twentieth century what it certainly was for the 
Christians of the early Church — a vital factor 
dominating characters and actions — it can only be 
if we discover in our doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
truths which are of essential value for our own 
thought and life. Do the words, " I believe in the 
Holy Ghost " enshrine for us any such essential 
truths ? I believe they do. 

Let us take that unpromising word " pro- 
ceeding," that technical term describing the function 
of the Holy Spirit about which Greek and Latin 
theologians quarrelled so disastrously in the 



158 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



eleventh century. Our first feeling about it is that 
it is a figment of antiquated theology which the 
Church had better forget ; yet, as a matter of fact, 
" proceeding " sums up in one word just what, 
from first to last, the Bible tells us about the Holy 
Spirit's activity. Throughout the Old and New 
Testaments the Spirit is presented to our thought 
as a Divine Power issuing out of God, by which the 
Divine Life operates beyond itself, if we may be 
forgiven such a crudely spatial expression. In the 
Universe He has created, and, above all, in the 
lives of men, God Himself is at work, in and through 
His Spirit : that is the basal truth safeguarded by 
the doctrine of the " Procession " of the Spirit ; 
and it is obviously of very great importance both 
for Christian thought and Christian practice. 

First and foremost, it secures for Christian 
thought an adequate conception of the Nature of 
God, both as He is in Himself and as He is in 
relation to the world. 

(a) God as He is in Himself, — If we believe that 
the Holy Spirit is an essential reality in the Eternal 
Being of God, we are at once assured that the 
nature of the Divine Life is not static but dynamic ; 
in other words, that God is a living God — not an 
idea, but a force. His is no motionless eternity of 
perfection, but an overflowing vitality, an in- 
exhaustible fecimdity, the everlasting well-spring 
of all existence. Out of the depths of the Divine 
Nature there flows unceasingly an infinitude of 
love and truth and beauty which constitutes the 
transcendent happiness of God as He is in Himself, 
the Supreme and Perfect Being. 

(b) God in His Relation to the World, — And 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 159 



because He is a living God He does not keep Him- 
self to Himself. His life is an overflowing life, 
and creation is the vessel into which it overflows. 
He has brought into existence this finite world of 
space and time that it may share His bliss ; for 
all His ineffable transcendence we cannot think 
of Him simply as a distant and external First 
Cause of the Universe ; always there is proceeding 
from Him that life force which we call His Spirit, 
to operate in the vast evolving processes of the 
world, and to give imperishable value to all that 
is true and good and beautiful in this transitory 
sphere of space and time. 

Thus Christianity maintains the truth of God's 
immanence in the world as well as of His trans- 
cendence above it ; it recognises the operation of 
the ever-proceeding Spirit in all the wonders of 
Nature, and in every work of art and every dis- 
covery of knowledge which enriches civilisation 
and enlarges human life. 

But, above all, it venerates, as the highest 
operation of the Spirit, that which He is perpetually 
doing in the sphere of Christianity itself, as He 
" sanctifieth the elect people of God," reproducing 
Christ in Christians. Were it not for this Power of 
the Spirit Christianity would be the despair instead 
of the hope of men ; for in the Person of Jesus 
Christ we should see revealed a perfection at once 
human and divine, which nevertheless remained 
for ever unattainable by weak and sinful humanity. 
Like men who, shipwrecked in a tempestuous sea, 
catch sight of the sunlit beauties of a land which 
their failing strength can never reach, so we, 
beholding from our powerlessness the glory of God 



160 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



reflected in the face of Jesus Christ, would know 
that not for us was that bright life of Heaven, were 
it not that " the Spirit helpeth our infirmities," 
and can transform us into Cliristlikeness, from 
glor}^ to glor}^ So it is in this specifically Christian 
experience of the Spirit's power as " He proceedeth 
from the Father through the Son," that men 
realise His influence in the world at its highest. 

In its practical aspect the doctrine of the 
Procession of the Spirit implies this : that the 
Religion of the Spirit can never stand still ; like 
the Spirit Himself it must ever be going forth, 
expanding, progressing. Wherever we find stag- 
nation and reaction, there the Spudt of Life is 
being resisted and quenched ; in the life both of 
the individual and of the Church utter selfishness 
and self-satisfaction ma}^ shut out the Wind of 
Heaven. 

It follows that Christianity must be from its 
very nature {a) a growing and progessive move- 
ment, and (b) a movement embodied in and 
energising through a society. 

(a) Both as a S3^stem of thought and as a 
system of practical conduct a realty sphitual 
Christianity will be always growing and expanding ; 
Christians can never at any given moment know 
all that is to be known of God's truth, as it stands 
revealed 5^et hidden in Christ ; the ever-moving 
stream of history brings Christianit}^ perpetualh- up 
against new crises, new problems, new discoveries, 
new forces, philosophical, scientific, political ; it 
is the function of the Holy Spirit to impart to 
Christ's disciples the mind of Christ, and thus to 
enable them to bring to bear upon the data of our 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 161 



increasing experience Christ's ideals, Christ's 
principles, Christ's methods, so that Christians in 
all places and in all ages may deal with the circum- 
stances in which they find themselves as Jesus 
Himself would deal with them, were He still 
incarnate here on earth. The Christian Church, 
like the Christ Himself, should increase in wisdom 
as it increases in stature ; it should always be 
learning, that it may always be teaching ; it should 
shirk no difficulty, it should welcome all new light, 
proving all things, holding fast to that which is 
good. The timidity and slackness that shrink 
from facing the re-statements and re-adjustments 
of creed and organisation that advancing knowledge 
and changing conditions necessitate are unworthy 
of those who profess a belief in the Holy Spirit ; 
a faith which shirks criticism and self-criticism is 
no gift of His. 

(b) Christianity, as the religion of " the Spirit 
which proceedeth," is in its very nature a social 
religion. We cannot as individual believers keep 
the Spirit for ourselves ; if we will not share Him 
with others, if He fails to find a way by which He 
can proceed through our lives into yet other lives. 
He leaves us. He is the Spirit of Fellowship, of 
Unity, of Love ; and Love can never live in isolation 
whether in God or in man ; Love must be poured 
forth on others or it ceases to be Love ; hence it 
is that the Spirit of God, Who is Love, carries on 
the life and work of Christ in humanity not through 
mere individuals as such, but through individuals 
who are members of a society. The Christian 
Society, the Holy Catholic Church, came into 
existence to be the ideal sphere of the Spirit's 

L 



162 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



operation, created not by man but by the Spirit ; 
in it faith and hope and love are embodied and 
organised. Only in proportion as its members 
subordinate their individual interests to its cor- 
porate welfare, and contribute to its common life 
the gifts which the Spirit gives to each, will they 
themselves be enriched and strengthened, until 
they all grow up together into that perfect man- 
hood which the Incarnation of the Son of God has 
made possible for all. 

And the Christian Society itself, like the Christian 
individual, cannot keep the life of the Spirit within 
it to itseh without being false to the very principle 
of its existence ; unless the Church is doing its 
utmost to impart its own inspkation to the rest of 
humanity as 3^et outside the Church, its own 
inspiration flags and dies. From its very nature, 
as the Spirit-bearing Body, the Christian Church 
must be a missionary church or cease to be itself. 

But because the Spirit of Selfishness, which is 
the age-long enemy of the Spirit of Love, is not 
yet killed, Christendom, instead of being one strong 
united worldwide Commonwealth of Christ, is a 
welter of self-seeking sects. Everywhere the action 
of the Spirit is being thwarted by our divisions, 
and the disunion of Christendom is one chief reason 
why Christian experience of the Power of the Holy 
Spirit is to-day so dim and vague. 

Christians must face the facts and discern the 
signs of the times. At the present moment there 
are other groups and societies of men where fellow- 
ship and social co-operation flourish more than 
they do in the Christian Church ; it is a fact that 
to-day a man may often learn, through membership 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



163 



of a college, or a regiment, or a labour organisation, 
more of the force and the inspiration which come 
into a life as the result of self-devotion to the 
common good, than most men ever learn through 
membership in the Christian Body. The Spirit of 
Truth and Love and Power is " a wind which blow- 
eth where it listeth," and for some of God's good 
purposes for men that Spirit is just now more 
active and effectual outside the Christian society 
than within it. 

To recognise this fact is not dishonourable 
to Christians, but to acquiesce in it is disgrace. 
How can the Church best set about remedying this 
disastrous state of things ? Only by setting itself 
once more to discover and then to live by the " truth 
as it is in Jesus." But if we are to hope to get at 
that truth we must employ means and methods 
which we can believe are those of the Holy Spirit 
of Truth Himself. Is not the shattered unity of 
Christendom itself a proof that Christians in the 
past have not used Christian methods for arriving 
at that truth which should unite and not divide 
them ? And, now that Christendom is thus 
divided, is it not clear that not one of its sections 
can rightly claim to know the whole of Christian 
truth so long as it is content to remain in complete 
isolation from the rest ? Yet the continued 
existence of so many and so varied Christian 
societies in spite of their separation from each 
other is in itself a sign that each of them inherits 
some valuable and abiding truth of doctrine or of 
discipline, which it has cultivated but others have 
ignored ; clearly, then, we must abandon those 
mad methods of controversy which have made 



164 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



" odium theologicum " proverbially the bitterest 
of all hatreds, and learn, though still divided, to 
co-operate as best we can. And already we are 
learning : we are learning to respect the convictions 
of others as we rightly respect our own ; we are 
learning to pray together, to study together, and 
to act together, in spite of our great differences ; 
we are learning that in religion affirmation is more 
fruitful than negation, and that truth is more often 
comprehensive than exclusive. And just in those 
movements among Christians where all this is 
being learnt are men experiencing once more the 
living inspiration of a Power not theirs but God's. 
The Holy Spirit is still with us, and if we will but 
let Him He will yet guide us into all the truth. 

And as the Spirit teaches us we must act upon 
what He teaches ; the Church must not shrink from 
experiments and adventures, it must be prepared 
to " live dangerously," as it did in the great days 
of old. Our Saviour promised the Spirit's divine 
assistance to disciples who were read}^ for His 
Name's sake, to bear their witness in face of 
persecutions ; and we, too, must have the courage 
of our convictions, cost what it may, if we are to 
expect the Spirit to make of us Christians of to-day 
what He made of those first disciples. 

We, like them, are men on whom the " ends of 
the ages are come." An old world is in its death 
agon}^ a new world is struggling to its birth ; and 
as then out of terror and darkness the Eternal 
Christ arose and gave His Spirit to His own, so, 
too, to us will He vouchsafe another Pentecost, and 
renew the face of the earth. 



X 



THE HOLY TEINITY 

IT is indeed no ungrateful task to write for the 
National Mission a paper on the doctrine of 
the Trinity. The mind of the Christian English- 
man has, like every other mind, its own tenden- 
cies to misbelief, but it has no such tendency 
here. Heresy as to the doctrine of the Trinity 
belongs to the East rather than to the West, and 
the Englishman is a Western of the Westerns. 
He may misunderstand the mind of the Church, 
and so suppose himself to differ from it, but there 
is no real severance ; the Church thinks as he thinks 
and feels as he feels. If at times she speaks as he 
does not speak, that is only because she has had 
dangers against which to guard of which the 
Christian Englishman is unaware. Let him but 
understand the Church, and he will approve her 
attitude as the Church approves his. 

What is the mind of the Christian Englishman 
as he thinks of God ? Most profoundly does he 
believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus is 
his Saviour, the Lord and Master of his life, and 
he longs to drink deep of His Spirit. But he desires 
a simple and, above all, a practical religion, and he 
has little interest in religious speculation. For his 
own part, he does not expect to understand the 



166 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



mystery of the Godhead. The theologians of the 
Church may see farther than he does, but before 
such a mystery we must all be as little children. 
Religion, he is sure, should be a thing of the heart 
and of the life rather than of the head ; it is what 
we are and do that matters. His dislike of the 
Athanasian Creed is largely rooted in intellectual 
humility. He does not think that he knows better 
than the Church, or desire to correct her teachings ; 
but he does not see how^ anybody can really know 
as much about God as the Church there seems to 
him to claim to know. He wishes by the Spirit to 
serve God and follow his Master Christ, and the 
Athanasian Creed seems to hinder rather than to 
help him. Does the Church blame him for adopting 
this attitude ? Rather she meets him at almost ever}^ 
point with enthusiastic agreement. But there is 
just one thing which the Christian Englishman has 
overlooked. The members of the Church have not 
all taken so modest a view of their powers as the 
Englishman. Many in the past have not been at 
all willing to take mysteries patiently, and, in 
trying to clear them up, they have really denied or 
explained away the facts upon which the Christian 
life depends. " Because this Divine mystery," 
says Richard Hooker, " is more true than plain, 
divers, having framed the same to their own 
conceits and fancies, are found in their expositions 
thereof more plain than true." Thus the Church 
has been obliged in the interests of the Clu'istian 
life to insist upon the facts, and to repudiate these 
denials and explanations in language as explicit as 
she could find. Her best teachers deplored the 
necessity, and said plainly that they deplored 



THE HOLY TRINITY 167 



it ; * it was torture to them to treat the truths 
revealed in God's dealings with us as if they were 
propositions in Euclid, and to define where they 
only wished to adore. But if, when the Church 
spoke in her own reverent and cautious way, men 
insisted that she meant what she did not mean, and 
could not mean without forfeiting the foundations 
of her life, what would the Englishman himself 
have her do ? The whole purpose of the Church 
is to insist upon facts ; she demands of us, as we 
shall presently see, the acceptance of no theories 
which go beyond them. 

How, let us ask, can we know God ? Can our 
little minds understand all the mystery of His 
nature ? Obviously not. Indeed, there is nothing 
that we can know in its entirety except the con- 
ceptions of our own minds. Take, for example, 
a straight line, as Euclid defines it. The straight 
line is simply a mental conception — there are no 
straight lines in nature — and therefore it presents 
no difficulty. Define it as Euclid defines it, and 
you can know about it all that there is to be known. 
But contrast with the straight line the very small- 
est beetle. The beetle is a humble portion of 
reality ; the beetle is actually there ; and thus we 
might spend a lifetime in the study of the beetle, 

* Cf . the language of St. Hilary, De Trinitate, II. 2 (quoted by Tyrrell, 
Through Scylla and Charybdis, p. 354, note). " We are forced through 
the fault of heretics and blasphemers to do that which is unlawful, to 
climb inaccessible heights, to speak what cannot be uttered, to encroach 
upon what is forbidden. And whereas we should be content to find out 
by simple faith what we have to do — ^namely, to adore the Father and 
venerate with Him the Son, to abound in the Holy Ghost — we are com- 
pelled to stretch the littleness of our discourse to the compass of matters 
unspeakable, and are driven to wrong-doing through the wrong-doing 
of others : so that what should be treasured in the devout soul is now 
committed to all the dangers of human language." 



168 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



and know him but imperfectly at the end of it. 
Now if this be so with all reality, how imperfect 
must be our knowledge of God, the highest reality 
of all ! If the world is as complex and as wonder- 
ful as we find it, what should we expect that God 
would be found to be ? That He is a Trinity in 
Unity no doubt appears to higher intelligences 
than ours a merely elementary truth about Him. 
The nature of God would indeed be simple if that 
were all that there were to be known. Thus all 
that we can know of God is just what He reveals 
to us, and not even His Divine skill can reveal to 
us more than our little minds are able to receive. 
That is not to say that we can know nothing of 
God, or that our knowledge of Him is not real 
knowledge as far as it goes. To say that would 
be not merely to exhibit a distrust of our faculties 
of knowledge, which is quite irrational, but also 
to deny to God Himself the power of self -revelation.* 
St. Paul says that we are made to seek God, if 
haply we may feel after Him, and find Him. 
Certainly God can reveal Himself, if He desires 
to do so, and the religious experience of men 
assures us that He has so desired. We do find 
God — " not His semblance, but Himself " ; the 
religious instinct would not have survived, had 
it not been in contact with reality. But — and this 
is the great point to be observed — we must depend 
upon facts for our knowledge of God from first to 

* Of course, all knowledge is relative to our human faculties ; the 
eye can only see what it brings with it the power of seeing. But this 
no more makes our knowledge of God unreliable than it makes our 
knowledge of the world unreliable. Trust in our faculties is as necessary 
to physical science as to theology. 



THE HOLY TRINITY 169 



last, and we cannot know in advance what will be 
revealed. It is with our knowledge of God just 
as it is with our knowledge of the world about us ; 
facts, and not abstract reasoning, must be our 
guide. In the Middle Ages the minds of men were 
by no means destitute of ideas about the world in 
which we live, but those ideas were largely erroneous, 
and therefore misleading, because they had little 
except speculation upon which to rest. Nowadays 
we are humbler. The man of science to-day makes 
considerable use of speculation and hypothesis, 
but it is facts upon which he mainly relies ; care- 
fully and laboriously he investigates facts, and tests 
his hypotheses by them. That does not render 
his conclusions simpler than those of the Middle 
Ages — very far from it ; but it does render them 
immeasurably truer. So it is with our knowledge 
of God. If it is to be reliable, it must rest upon 
facts. A true knowledge of God is very unlikely 
to give us a simple view of Him ; the conception 
of the Unitarian is a great deal too simple to be 
true. But truth is of far more practical import- 
ance than simplicity can ever be, and it is facts 
which must lead us to it. 

How, then, has the Christian view of God been 
actually reached ? By a frank reliance upon the 
facts of human history and experience. The 
Hebrews, unlike the Greeks, had no gifts for 
philosophy. They do not seem in any conscious 
way even to have reasoned from the world to the 
existence of God.* Their interest in God was 

* The witness of the world to God is a witness drawn from experi- 
ence. But Ps. xix. 1-6 and similar passages are probably not incon- 
sistent with t he view expressed above. They are not statements of the 



170 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



almost entire!}^ practical ; they were not concerned 
with the question what God might be in His 
own interior life. But of this they were certain. 
Their God had revealed Himself to them in the 
facts of their history and experience, and there was 
no doubt as to what the revelation had been. At 
first they had thought of Him much as other 
Semitic peoples thought of the " gods many, and 
lords man}^," in whom they believed, but He 
Himself convinced them that He was far other than 
tliej. He had a purpose — so the Hebrews found — 
and in the working out of His purpose there was 
nothing which could say Him nsiY. He dealt with 
nations and with men as onl}^ their Maker and Lord 
could deal with them. He had brought His people 
Israel out of Egypt with a mighty Hand and a 
stretched-out Arm ; He had planted them in their 
own land ; all the gods of the heathen had been as 
nothing before Him. He had chosen Israel for 
His own people, and made a covenant with them. 
He had given them His holy law, and shown 
Himseh able to vindicate it when they set it aside. 
Marvellously gracious He was, marvellously long- 
suffering, but He was strict none the less ; He 
would by no means clear the guilty, and somehow 
the consequences of sin did not die with those who 
committed it. vSo, by the witness of facts, the 
Hebrews came to know the Name * of Yahveh 

" cosmological " and " teleological " arguments for Grod's existence. 
The Hebrews seem to have reached their belief that God was the Creator 
and Lord of the world by their own national experience, and to have 
employed the world as a witness to Him after they had done so. 

* " The Xame of Yahveh " in Holy Scripture is ever in the closest 
connection with Yahveh Himself. It is the expression of His character 
and attributes. ^Vhere God's Name is, He is. " The Name of Yahveh 
is a strong tower," because it expresses all that He has shown Himself 



THE HOLY TRINITY 171 



their God — " Yahveh, Yahveh, a God full of 
compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and 
plenteous in mercy and truth ; keeping mercy for 
thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression 
and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty ; 
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, 
upon the third and upon the fourth generation." 
Beautiful stories had come down to them of 
Yahveh's proclamation of His Name, but the great 
proclamation was not in word, but in fact. The 
Hebrews did not believe that God was Almighty, 
or All-wise, or All-holy, or All-gracious because 
their philosophers had proved that He must be so, 
or even mainly because their seers had declared 
that He was so ; they believed it because their 
whole national experience had established the truth 
upon the rock of fact. 

But what of Yahveh's inner nature ? Was He 
manifold, as well as one ? This the Hebrews were 
far too exclusively practical to consider. He was 
One in the sense that there was none other than He, 
all the gods of the heathen being but vanity ; but 
further than this they hardly went. They did 
not indeed think of Him as a bare and barren unity. 
Though the Holy One of Israel was raised im- 
measurably above the world and the turmoil of 
human life. He had revealed Himself within them 
both. His Divine Wisdom, though brought forth 
before the world, joyously realised itself before Him 
in the world itself."^ The stories, which had come 

to be to us. Similarly, such names as Peter and Boanerges are the 
expression of the character of those who bear them — of what they are 
to the Lord and to their brethren. 

* Prov. viii. 22-31 and similar descriptions of the Divine Wisdom in 
the Apocrypha lie behind John i. 1-3, Col. i. 15-17, and Heb. i, 1-3. 



172 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



down from the past, spoke frequently of a mysterious 
angel of Yahveh, in whom was Yahveh's Name, 
Their heroes, their seers, even their craftsmen 
were what they were because the Spirit of Yahveh 
was within them. But such facts did not stir them 
to theological speculation as they might have 
stirred the Greeks ; they took the facts as they 
found them, and neither philosophised about them 
nor explained them away. Very English all this 
was ; no nation can in this understand the Hebrews 
better than we can ourselves. 

Thus far for the Old Testament. And then 
into the world of experience Jesus of Nazareth 
came, and in Him their God drew nearer to them 
than ever He had drawn before. Of Him it was 
true far more wonderfully than of any Angel of the 
Lord in bygone days, that God's Name was in Him. 
He was " the wisdom of God and the power of God," 
" the effulgence of His glory and the very image of 
His substance " — not in theory, but in fact. There, 
plainly manifested in Him and through Him, were 
the very redeeming power, the very holiness, the 
very wisdom and authority, the very patience 
and long-suffering of God Himself. And not only 
had He this Name ; He spoke and bore Himself as 
One Who had it. His language was seldom, if 
ever, theological language. He spoke of the 
Father, and of His own relation to the Father, out 
of the heart of His own spiritual experience. 
Distinct from the Father He certainly was, in every 
act and word subordinate to Him. His whole life 
and bearing were a proclamation that the Father 
was greater than He. But His followers found in 
Him God Himself ; He spoke with an authority 



THE HOLY TRINITY 173 



which God alone could exercise ; He claimed a 
devotion which to God alone could rightly be given ; 
He promised to do, and did, a work beyond all 
human power ; He said that wherever two or three 
were gathered in His Name He would be in the 
midst of them.* So it was with the Spirit, which 
He promised. God's Name was in Him too. He 
too was found, in the experience of the Church, to 
possess the redeeming power, the holiness, the 
wisdom, the authority, the patience of God Himself. 
As the Son had been to the Father, so the Spirit 
proved to be to the Son, distinct from Him in some 
sense, and yet mysteriously one with Him. He 
witnessed to the Son, glorified the Son in the minds 
of men, took of what was the Lord's and manifested 
it, and yet at the same time He filled the Lord's 
place. They found God in Him, as they had found 
God in the Lord ; His presence made them God's 
very temples. The Name of Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit, into which Christians were baptised, was 
found in actual experience to be one and the same 
Name. Thus it is out of the fulness of their own 
experience that the Apostles ever speak. Mono- 
theists they remain without any qualification, but, 
as Dr. Wace has said : " It is their habitual and 
natural language to speak of the Lord Jesus Christ 
and of the Holy Spirit in the same terms and in the 

* " The Church did not infer the divineness of the salvation from the 
divinity of the Saviour, as modern Christians often think that they must 
do : it inferred the divinity of the Saviour from the divineness of the 
salvation. Neither did it argue that God must be found in Jesus 
because He is there : it inferred that God is in Jesus because He is there 
so gloriously found. We prove the divinity of Christ : they beheld it. 
We have fallen back on intellectual methods : they built on spiritual 
experience." — W. N. Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God. 



174 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



same associations as those in which they speak of 
God."* Throughout their writings the Lord is the 
object of faith, and not merely the example of it ; 
and, if the same is not so obviously true of the Holy 
Spirit, that is because His relation to ourselves as 
the Inspirer of our faith and devotion makes it 
less natural to think of Him as the object of our 
faith also. Again and again the Apostles in their 
writings pass from One Person to Another of the 
Blessed Trinity in a way which shows that, while 
on the one hand they distinguish Them, on the 
other they adopt the same attitude towards all 
Three. The well-known words, The grace of the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the 
communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all," 
are simply the most familiar example of a fact plain 
to every student of the New Testament. Everj^- 
where we see plainly that it is facts upon which 
they are resting, and not speculation. If St. John 
makes a passing reference to the philosophic 
doctrine of the Divine " Word," he derives nothing 
from it ; he emploj^s it simply to express the 
conclusion which the Lord's actual life and work 
had forced upon him. Christians in later days 
have often argued for the doctrine of the Trinity 
upon philosophic grounds, f and there are minds to 
Avhich such arguments make a real appeal. But 
such arguments are unknown to the writers of the 

* Cf. Wace, Christianity and Morality, Series II., Lecture vii. The 
writer of this paper is greatly indebted to that admirable book. 

t The main philosophical argument arises from the difficulty of 
conceiving of God as a " living God," if we deny the existence of real 
distinctions in His interior life. Eternal love seems to require an eternal 
object of love, eternal thought an eternal object of thought, and eternal 
will an eternal product of that will. If in order to rid ourselves of thi^ 



t 



THE HOLY TRINITY 175 

New Testament ; their reliance is upon facts — we 
might almost* say upon facts alone. It is just 
because God in His Son and in His Spirit has drawn 
so near to us that something of the mystery of His 
interior life has come within our view. 

But then the Englishman will say, that it is not 
the language of the New Testament to which he 
takes exception, nor indeed to the ordinary devo- 
tional language which the Church employs in her 
hymns, her doxologies, and other such expressions 
of her mind. Such language, he fully recognises, 
is the natural language of religious experience — 
of the religious experience of the Apostles — and in 
measure, he hopes, of his own also. Omnia exeunt 
in mysterium, and it is foolish to quarrel with facts 
because we find a difficulty in fully accounting for 
them. His objection is that the Church seems to 
require him to go behind the facts, and to accept an 
elaborate theory as to the nature of God in order 
to account for them. He does not object to the 
doctrine of the Trinity ashefindsitintheAthanasian 
Creed on the ground that it is a bad theory, but 
on the ground that it is an unnecessary one, and 
that no means exist for its verification. Now it 
is just at this point that the Englishman by no 
fault of his own misunderstands the Church's 
language. Individual teachers of the Church have 
propounded theories as to the interior life of God, 
but the Church does not ask our acceptance of 

difficulty we regard the world as eternal, we make God dependent for the 
fullness of His life upon the world, and are thus involved in overwhelm- 
ing difficulties of a different kind. Such arguments, however, appeal as 
little to the ordinary English mind as they would have appealed to the 
Hebrew. 

* Almost, because the New Testament writers do also refer to the 
language of the Old Testament to support their faith— e.g^. in Heb. i. 



176 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



any one of them. The so-called doctrine of the 
Trinity, as we find it most full}^ expressed in the 
Athanasian Creed, is, like the so-called " laws " 
of natm-e, not so much a theory to account for 
the facts of experience, as a convenient summary 
of the facts of experience themselves. The im- 
pression Avhich the Athanasian Creed commonly 
makes upon the mind is due, partly to the use of 
words which sound like the language of an exact 
science, and partly to the fact that the author, in 
the careful balancing of his clauses, seems, like 
the guide at the Hampton Court maze, to be sur- 
veying from a loftier standpoint than our own the 
territory of which he speaks, and to be directing 
us moment by moment whether to turn to the 
right hand or to the left. The history of Christian 
doctrine, however, plainly shows that the impression 
thus made upon us is an erroneous one. A short 
explanation will make this clear. The Athanasian 
Creed simply asserts the facts we have already 
considered, while adding nothing to them. 

Let us consider, firstly, the language employed. 
To say that we worship One God as a Trinity, and 
the Trinity as a Unity, is simpty to assert the 
revealed fact of the unity of Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit, without in any way attempting to explain 
it. To say that we must not confound, or confuse, 
the Persons simply means that, as the revealed 
facts declare, we must not regard Father, Son, and 
Holy Spirit as merely three different names for 
one and the same God. The word " Person " is 
a most unfortunate word, but it is difficult to suggest 
any other to take its place which would not be 
equally unfortunate. Human language fails us 



THE HOLY TRINITY 177 



when we try to describe the facts of our own nature ; 
it is worse than inadequate when we try to describe 
the facts of God's. The Church does not mean 
that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinguished 
One from Another as human persons are dis- 
tinguished ; the facts themselves forbid such a 
view. On the contrary, so perfect is their unity 
that, as St. Basil says : " If any one truly receive 
the Son, he will find that He brings with Him, on 
the one hand, the Father, on the other, the Holy 
Spirit. For neither can He be severed from the 
Father Who is ever of and in the Father : nor again 
disunited from His own Spirit Who operates all 
things by means of It." The word " Person " 
has no definable meaning. There are three— 
what shall we say ? Perhaps, when we know as 
we are known, we may fill the blank. Meanwhile 
the word "Person" is like the x in algebra; it 
stands for what is to us unknown, f So it is also 
with the word " Substance." To say that we 
must not divide the substance means that the 
Divine attributes, as we know them, belong alike 
to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this, as we 
have seen, is a fact of experience. But what the 
substance, or reality, of God, in all its greatness 
may be, the Church neither knows nor claims 
to know. So once more with the words be- 
gotten " and " proceeding," which are used to 
describe the relation of the Son and of the Spirit 

* Quoted by Bishop Forbes, Explanation of the Nicene Creed, p. 82. 

t The Church does not even assert that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit 
are to be distinguished in the same way, but only that they are to be 
distinguished. If, e.g., any one wishes to maintain that the Holy Spirit's 
distinction from the Son is less marked in experience than the Son's 
distinction from the Father, it is quite open to him to do so. 

M 



178 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



respectively to the Father. The Church attaches 
to these words no deep philosophical significance, 
nor presumes to sa}^ in what precisely the meaning 
of the one differs from the meaning of the other ; 
she borrows them from the simple and popular 
language of Scripture itself. To say that the Son 
is " not made, nor created, but begotten " is but 
to say that, though in His eternal being our Lord 
is no part of the created universe. His relation to 
the Father is one of Sonship and dependence. To 
say that the Holy Ghost is neither made, nor 
created, nor begotten, but proceeding," is simply 
to reproduce the Lord's language. It is to say 
that He proceeds from God to us as from an ever- 
living fountain, even as He takes us with Him back 
to God. 

" From the great deep to the great deep He goes." 

In aU this there is nothing technical, nothing 
added to the revealed facts. The Christian English- 
man believes every word of it. And if, to pass to 
his second difficulty, the author of the Creed seems 
unduly pontifical in his attitude towards us, we 
should observe that his balanced clauses do not 
claim any knowledge which the revealed facts 
themselves do not yield. AU that he realty does 
is to illustrate the formula, " Neither confounding 
the Persons, nor dividing the Substance," by 
applying it to the revealed attributes of God. If 
he says of the Son and of the Spirit as of the Father 
that Each is uncreated and incomprehensible and 
eternal — incomprehensible here means not to be 
contained in any portion of space — if again he 
says that Each is Almighty and that Each is Lord, 



THE HOLY TRINITY 



179 



that is merely to draw out for simple minds what 
is meant by saying that Each is God. 

We may then boldly affirm that the Athanasian 
Creed itself is a monument of that respect for facts 
and dislike for abstract speculation which the 
Church shares with the Christian Englishman. 
We may add that the Church gives it to us just in 
order that, as the Englishman desires, we may 
have a religion of the heart, and not of the head. 
Is that mere paradox ? On the contrary, it is the 
simple truth. Had the Church wished us to have 
a religion of the head, she would never have 
insisted upon the doctrine of the Trinity, or given 
us the Athanasian Creed. The intellect finds the 
doctrine extremely difficult, and the intellect does 
not love what is difficult ; it desires something 
beneath it that it can grasp from top to bottom, 
not something far above it, which it can only 
dimly apprehend. There are those in our own day, 
as there were also in the early centuries, who are 
what we call intellectualists. Their powers of 
intellect are considerable, while their religious 
sense, their powers of contemplation and of worship, 
are little developed, and they prefer rather to 
exercise the powers which they have than to seek 
after those which they have not. What is their 
attitude towards this doctrine, and towards the 
Creed which especially enshrines it ? Mystery, 
which feeds the religious sense, is an offence to the 
intellect, and the intellectualist is always disposed 
to explain it away. Formerly he tended towards 
Unitarianism ; to-day he tends rather towards 
what the Athanasian Creed calls " confounding 
the Persons." He speaks of finding God in the 



180 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



order and beauty of the world, in the life of Jesus 
Christ, and in the heart of man, as if there were no 
distinctions known to us within the life of God, 
but only a Unity, which through different means 
we dimly apprehend. That is, of course, to explain 
the doctrine away, and those who do so naturally 
show a strong dislike for the Athanasian Creed. 
But the Church gives it to us not because of its 
appeal to the mind, but because of the power of 
the truth which it proclaims over the heart and the 
life. To believe that " the Son is God " is to 
believe that He Who lived our human life, and died 
our human death, was God Himself come down 
to us, God Himself entering into all our human 
experience, to suffer with us and to suffer for us. 
To believe that " the Holy Ghost is God " is to 
believe that the Voice which speaks in our souls 
to-day l^is no mere natural conscience of our own, but 
God Himself dwelling in us, God Himself interesting 
Himself in every one of us, God Himself striving 
with all our wilfulness and sin, God Himself never 
resting till all His high purpose for us is fulfilled. 
There is no other belief, there never has been any 
other belief, able to touch the heart like this. It 
is God's love, God's sympathy, God's sacrifice of 
Himself, that touch and that win us. If we do 
not believe in the Divinity of the Son and of the 
Holy Spirit, there is nothing left that wiU touch 
us and win us in the same way. The Church does 
not teach these doctrines simply because they are 
useful ; she teaches them because the facts have 
shown them to be true. But she insists upon 
them as she does because they lead to a religion 
of the heart and of the life, while their denial or 



THE HOLY TRINITY 181 



neglect leads to nothing of the kind. What says 
experience ? Shall we look at the Mission Field ? 
Roman Catholics are there ; Anglicans and 
Russians are there ; Presbyterians, Moravians, 
Wesleyans are there ; believers in the Trinity of 
every country and of every class are there at work 
for God, living for Him, dying for Him. Where 
are those who reject or sit loose to the doctrine ? 
They are not very prominent in Christian evan- 
gelisation. 

One point more, and that not as to the doctrine 
itself, but as to the Athanasian Creed. Has the 
Church any quarrel with the Englishman's con- 
viction that it is what we are and do that matters ? 
Certainly not. The closing words of the Creed 
are most clear upon the point. But do not the 
miscalled " damnatory clauses " contradict them ? 
Let us see. If those clauses shock our conscience 
and our reason, it is because we misunderstand 
them. Let us observe that we are concerned with 
what the Creed means, and not with what it may 
have meant when it was written. It is given to 
us for our acceptance not by the Church of some 
other day, but by the Church of our own day, and 
its meaning is the meaning which the Church now 
gives to it. Did the so-called damnatory clauses 
ever mean that we should perish everlastingly as 
a punishment for refusing the teaching of the 
Church ? We do not know the author of the Creed, 
and still less do we know his exact meaning. But 
the Church of the West, in the fifth century and 
for long after, had mainly to deal with barbarians 
who had the minds of children, and she undoubtedly 
attached an importance to intellectual docility 



182 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



which does not normally belong to it. This 
question, however, is of no practical interest 
to-da}^ Whether or not this was once the Church's 
meaning, it is not her meaning now. Not only 
the English Church, but the Roman Church also, 
fully recognise that God does not hold us responsible 
for unbelief or misbelief which is not our own fault. 
What, then, is it that these clauses mean to-da}^ ? 
Tlie}^ warn us, firstty, that we are all to some extent 
responsible for what we believe. Not only are we 
responsible for honest investigation, but in all 
belief worthy of the name the will has its part to 
pla}^ Faith involves to some extent a leap in the 
dark, which on adequate grounds it is our duty to 
make. The clauses warn us, secondly, that what 
we are and do cannot be separated from our 
intellectual convictions ; belief arouses emotion 
and desire, and desire issues in action and in 
character. But there is more than this. Christian 
faith brings union with God through Christ, and 
with it the transformation both of action and of 
character. Let us approach the truth by an 
illustration. Suppose that a statesman is arguing 
for National Service in these da^^s of crisis. He will 
tell us that without it we " cannot be saved," and 
that if Germany works her will with the British 
Empire, " without doubt it will perish ever- 
lastingly." Do we say that the statesman is 
intolerabl}^ harsh, and that he destroj^s the effect 
of the advice he gives by his deplorable damnatory 
clauses ? Do we suppose that he is maintaining 
the absurdity that the loss of our Empire will be a 
judgment upon us for the enormity of differing 
from him in opinion ? On the contrary, the loss. 



THE HOLY TRINITY 183 



if it comes, will result from our policy of drift. 
There is one question, and only one. Is what he 
says true ? If it is not, he has no right to say it ; 
if it is, he has no right not to say it. The Church 
of God to-day speaks as he speaks, and means what 
he means. We perish everlastingly, if we perish, 
because of what we are and have done ; to reject 
the Creed only cuts us off from the remedy. What 
would we have the Church say ? The question 
whether we shall or shall not perish everlastingly 
is the question whether we have or have not eternal 
life. Eternal life is the gift of God. The Church 
knows no way to it, we ourselves know no way to it, 
except to receive it from Christ our Lord, nor of 
any way to receive it even from Him without faith 
in Him and self-surrender to His Holy Spirit, and 
such faith, such self-surrender, as are necessary 
can be given rightly only to our God. Perhaps we 
do not like this. But had we not better pay 
attention to the facts of our position ? Sin and 
eternal life are incompatible. How do we propose 
to get rid of our sin, and, having done so, lay hold 
of " the life which is life indeed " ? Can we do it 
without our Lord and His Spirit ? Can we do it 
without keeping our faith in Them " whole and 
undefiled " ? If we can, we need not trouble about 
the Athanasian Creed. On that happy morning 
when we wake to find sin dead within us by our 
own efforts,'and eternal life attained, the Athanasian 
Creed will be dead also. Till then it lives — lives 
not to curse us, but to bless us, by pointing us to 
that living God, that holy, blessed, and glorious 
Trinity, Who alone can deal with our case. 

But then we say : " Can we bear to believe 



184 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



this ? What of those who know not our Faith, or 
who, knowing it, honestly disbeHeve it ? Do we 
condemn them to eternal loss by accepting the 
Athanasian Creed ? " No, we do not. Let us 
listen to our Lord's words. " If any man " — 
there is no exception — " willeth to do God's will, 
lie shall know of the teaching whether it be of God, 
or whether I speak from Myself." If the Lord 
says, " Except ye believe that I am He, ye shall die 
in your sins," He says also that there is no one, in 
however black a darkness wandering, if only he 
wills in his inmost heart to do God's will, who will 
not ultimately attain to faith. Stern He might 
be to those who had seen and heard Him, God's 
perfect revelation, and yet refused to believe. He 
will not be equally stern to those who have heard 
only His servants to-day, with all our ignorance 
and misrepresentation of Him and of His Father. 
Though we ourselves fail. He has not necessarily 
failed. No man will ever perish by another's 
fault ; no man will ever be lost whom God's love 
can save. Somehow — somewhere — some day — ^the 
Lord will seek out His own sheep, and " deliver 
them out of all places whither they have been 
scattered in the cloudy and dark day." Only — he 
who wills to do God's will must strive to know 
whether the message of the Church is true. St. 
John assures us that the witness which he bears is 
"the Avitness of God." "He that believeth not 
God hath made Him a liar ; because he hath 
not believed in the witness that God hath borne 
concerning His Son." The evidence for the 
Christian faith was, St. John felt, so plainly God- 
given that no one could reject it without giving 



THE HOLY TRINITY 185 



God the lie. Can we will to do God's will if we do 
not examine it ? That is our challenge to England 
to-day. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a 
difficulty in the way of accepting the Christian faith 
and the Christian life. Rightly understood, it is 
an integral part of the one and the necessary 
foundation of the other. 



XI 



THE CHURCH 

" The Holy Catholick Church:" . 

LOYALTY to the Church is essential to 
Christian Jiving. Yet no notion is more 
cleepty disHked. Often it is rejected in the name 
of a pure Christianity. The word " ecclesiastical " 
suggests repulsive conventionality. Similar taunts 
are now levelled at those who hold a high moral 
ideal. Therefore they disturb us less. 

An Unmediated Eeligion — not 
Christianity 

First comes the claim for an unmediatedreligion. 
The vital fact, it is said, is the experience of the 
mystic — " the flight of the alone to the alone." 
Church, priesthood, sacraments, are external. 
Those who regard them are formalists. They act 
as screens between the soul and God. The religion 
here suggested ma^^ be magnificent, but it is not 
Christian. We may grant that the soul has 
immediate communion with God. But this cannot 

Prefatory Note. — This paper is not a complete treatise on the 
Church. In regard to the illustrations used, they must not be taken 
as exact parallels. They serve only to make clearer certain parts of the 
argument. I have added a short list of books of moderate compass 
dealing with the subject. 

J. N. F. 



THE CHURCH 



187 



be identified with the historical Jesus of Nazareth 
— except through some kind of mediation. Even 
if we put aside all ecclesiastical institutions, we 
should need the New Testament. How else can 
we make any connexion between the light within 
and the Gospel of Jesus Christ ? The New Testa- 
ment is itself a social product — the creature of the 
earty Church. 

But, further, if you carry yowc dislike of media- 
tion to its conclusion, you can have no faith in 
Christ as Mediator. Those who object to the 
Church because it interferes with immediate com- 
munion are logically driven to repudiate the 
Saviour. Historically, that is what they do. 

The Invisible Church 

Many do not go so far as this. The New 
Testament is too strong for them to reject all idea 
of Churchmanship. How can any one do this who 
reads the Acts or the Epistles ? The cynic may 
note a " deplorable drop " from the maxim " love 
your neighbour " to " love the brotherhood." 
Such a view is impossible to any one who pays 
regard to St. Paul's oft-repeated phrase about the 
Church as " the body of Christ," still more to the 
final pictures in the Apocalypse. 

If the Church be " the fulness of Him that 
iilleth all in all," we shall not get the full Christian 
character apart from it. So much is now recognised. 
Then these high terms about the Church are made 
ground to deny the claims of any Church we see. 
She is holy, " without spot or wrinkle," the bride 
of Christ." Very good. The actual Church is 



188 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



full of corruption. Many of its members do not 
even try for the Christian ideal. These cannot be 
" the peculiar people, the royal nation, the holy 
priesthood." These high titles can attach only to 
the " saved." The Church we see is a caricature 
of the true Church. To that, and that alone, applies 
the language of the New Testament. That body 
is invisible. It is that society, " unknown and 
unknowable " to us, which is made up of the true 
children of God on their road to heaven. This 
doctrine of an invisible Church is not very popular 
now. It involves contradictions. Certain bonds, 
subtler than we know, do unite those striving for 
the same end in many different societies. But we 
cannot fairly speak of a social life of this kind. No 
corporate body can act as such, if it be entirely 
unrecognisable. It is better to discard the term 
" Church " than to employ it in this way. 

The Church and the Kingdom 

The argument for the visible Church Avas 
condensed in " Ecce Homo " — in the words : " Did 
Christ die for a metaphor ? " In other words, 
Was all the preaching of the Kingdom meaningless ? 
If our Lord had a message only for individuals, 
and no will to gather them into a flock, why did 
He talk about the Kingdom and pray that they 
might be one ? True, He used the term " Church " 
very little. Yet His claim to be Messiah involved 
it. The Messiah is the long-expected Redeemer of 
the Hebrew people. The Church is the Jewish 
Kingdom consummated. We are the " Israel of 
God." Disraeli used to call the Christian Church 



THE CHURCH 



189 



the one effective Jewish institution. Our Lord 
in founding the Apostolic college, the assembly 
in the upper room, the Pentecostal outpouring 
and its results, the whole life of early Christians 
pictured in the New Testament, show us a visible 
society with developing institutions. They do 
not show us isolated individuals, converted, and 
then making a union of convenience. 

Love and Social Unity 

The teaching of Jesus Christ involves this 
inevitably. Love is a social grace. If God be 
Love, and if human nature be formed to respond to 
Him, you cannot have pure individualism. Love 
is the secret of all reality. Our nature cannot fulfil 
itseK in isolation. We can realise ourselves only 
by going out of ourselves. Personality implies 
society. This is shown by the way in which, 
nowadays, the most extreme opponents of Christ 
deny that Love is the law either for God or man. 

The Church and Human Society 

The Church is supernatural in origin and aim. 
It is not unnatural. This truth of human nature 
governs all right thinking about politics. Each 
man has his own individuality ; but fellowship 
is the law of his being. The isolated man is in- 
conceivable. He would not be human ; he would 
have no language but a cry." This is not a 
discovery of Christianity. Long before, it was 
said that man is a political animal — i.e. social life 
is of the essence of his being. At no moment is 
he alone. His birth ushers him into a society. 



190 THE MEANING OE THE CREED 



He could not be reared without it. Even the 
exaggerated individuaUsm of the day before yester- 
day was possible only by the force of a highly 
elaborate social system. Long since individualism 
has vanished from politics. No one now thinks of 
the State as a contractual union between self- 
subsistent individuals, with no end but immediate 
utility. It is known as a common life, in which 
all share, moulding it, and being moulded by it. 
That is why loyalty is due to it — and sacrifice. 
Herein lies the difference between a true and a 
false notion of the Church. Does a man first 
become a Christian, and afterwards pick out for 
his convenience a society which suits him, and 
leave it when it does not ? Or is he a Christian 
because he is a baptised member of that society 
which began in the upper room ? We cannot 
read the New Testament and hold any other view 
than the latter — at least of the past. It is now 
admitted by those who do not hold it. To make 
their attack plausible they seek to discredit the 
New Testament. 

When we speak of Christianity we are speaking 
of a definite historical phenomenon. To adopt 
Christianity does not mean merely to accept certain 
ideals. It means to join the Church. The Church 
to us is the central fact in the spiritual experience 
of the race. To be a member of it is to live in 
touch with all its members, dead and living. 
The Church includes both. In the terms of art, 
she is militant here on earth, but in union with 
that larger part which is triumphant " beyond our 
bourne of time and space." How far the term 
Christian " may be fitting to denote a certain 



THE CHURCH 



191 



individual attitude irrespective of any society we 
need not inquire. That is not what it does mean. 
To be a Christian is to be a member of the Church, 
just as to be an Englishman is to be a subject of 
King George. 

The Incarnation and the Church 

All this is congruous with the Incarnation. 
Objections to the Church and the sacraments 
lead logically to a denial of that truth. The 
Incarnation tells us that we have not to worship 
God in abstraction. He entered into human life, 
submitting to its limitations. The Church is the 
continued expression of that life. She is called 
the body of Christ, " the fulness of Him that filleth 
all in all." It is the fulfilling, the development of 
the life of Jesus under earthly conditions. So well 
known are these words that we take them for 
granted. Westcott defines the body " as the 
expression of the life in terms of the environment." 
The Church is that society which is the means of 
the active and continued work of Jesus Christ 
in this world— i.e. JESUS CHRIST IS THE 
MEANING OF THE CHURCH. 

The Church Holy 

That is why we call it Holy. Many people 
cavil at this. How can the Church as we see it be 
called Holy ? This feeling, as we saw, was partly 
the ground for the theory of an Invisible Church. 
The Church, it was agreed, is described as Holy in 
the New Testament. This is not true of many 
individuals in it. It seemed, then, better to use 



192 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



the term "Church" for somethmg other than the 
actual concrete body. This is an error due to 
misconception of the nature of corporate life. 
Holiness is the end of the Church. In so far as 
she fulfils her object she is Holy. That is what she 
is always tending to be — even in times of corruption. 
Evidence of this is to be found in the revivals of 
the Church. These are more wonderful than her 
conquests. The greatest miracle in social history 
is the recuperative powder of the Church. Strong 
convictions may readily win territory in a rush. 
Proof of life is given in the power to hold it 
against counter-attacks and to recover lost 
ground. 

The Holiness of the Church is not the perfection 
of aU its members, but the moulding force of the 
supernatural life of the Spirit in the whole society. 
This life is communicated in the sacraments. 

x\nother evidence of this Holiness is the nature 
of some recent attacks. Formerly men assailed 
the Church for hypocrisy. They said that she 
was not living up to her ideals. This is true. So 
long as men are sinful, there will be a gap between 
what we are and what we want to be. The gap 
will be greatest where the ideal is highest. Now 
the boot is on the other leg. Men attack the 
Church on account of her ideal, not on account of 
its failure. Once we were wrong because we were 
not altogether successful, now we are wrong in so 
far as we are. Holiness, as defined by Christians — 
chastity, humility, self-denial, the " fruits of the 
Spirit " in St. Paul's phrase, are the target of scorn. 
The ideal is said to be decadent and unmanly. 
This attack could have no meaning were there 



THE CHURCH 



193 



not a sense in which the Church is rightly called 
" Holy." 

The Church One 

So it is with Christ's Church. The Church is One. 
How can that be true ? We see her " by schisms 
rent asunder." Between English, Eoman, and 
Russian Christians is there any unity save that of 
the Invisible Church ? On consideration we can 
see such unity, though imperfect. The structure 
is the same and the fundamental bonds. The 
Creed, the Sacraments, an ordained ministry under 
Episcopal government are common. Bodies who 
hold to these things tend to have certain qualities 
not found elsewhere. There is a freemasonry 
between people of a similar education independent 
of their actual school or college. Moreover, little 
as we may see it, we present a certain common 
front to the adversary. Attacks upon the Creed, 
upon the supernatural, upon the external forms, 
upon an Episcopally ordained ministry touch us 
all. Through these attacks more perfect union 
may come. The enemy will press us together-- 
just as the Germans have consolidated the British 
Empire. Schism, we must bear in mind, is a rent 
inside the Church. A child is baptised a member 
of Christ, not of any particular Church. Once 
more, constitutional unity does not now exist. 
It is far more feasible among those who have the 
same constitutional structure. Its chief obstacle 
is that structural addition, the autocratic Papacy, 
which depresses the episcopal order in a large part 
of the Church, 

N 



194 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



The Church Catholic 

Somewhat similar is the problem aroused by 
the word catholic." That means miiversal. 
Clearly the Church does not include the whole 
world. Many have not heard of it. Many who 
know its claims reject them. Again, it is said that 
if we want to make the Church universal, we ought 
to do away with all dogmatic tests. Many men 
have the religious spirit who could not say the 
Creeds. Some of them do not believe in God. 
Why do we exclude such men — devoted, thoughtful, 
high-minded ? The answer is twofold. (1) If the 
Catholic Church is to exist at all it must have 
some meaning. To state that meaning is to lay 
down a Creed. So long as men are free they will 
not all accept it. Except by persecution, or a 
unanimity which we cannot foresee in a sinful 
world, the Church cannot embrace every one. 
There is nothing about which men are unanimous. 
Even if the Church meant no more than the 
religion of humanity, that could not make it 
universal. The ideal of humanity is passionately 
rejected by some. (2) Secondly, what is pro- 
posed is a new test, the test of temperament. It 
is true that the religious temperament is indepen- 
dent of dogma. That temperament is far from 
being universal. If the Catholic Church be taken 
to be the society of all persons of religious feeling, 
whatever they think, it w^ould still remain a partial, 
exclusive body. The most arbitrary and aristo- 
cratic of all societies is a religious body with no 
bond but temperamental sympathy. 

The Church is Catholic because she appeals to 



THE CHURCH 



195 



(a) all men, (b) the whole of man. No limits of race, 
or sex, or age, or colour, or status affect member- 
ship. " There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor 
female, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free ; but 
Christ is all and in all." The Church meets the 
universal need for redemption to eternal life. 
The fact that some do not realise their need does 
not hinder the universality of her appeal. Also, 
she is Catholic because she appeals to the whole of 
man — body, soul and spirit. No instinct, no 
emotion, no faculty is left out — ^where it does not 
involve sin. Every part of human life in society 
it consecrates. It does not appeal to the inward 
only, but also to the outward. The Incarnation 
and the Sacraments are the charter of her liberties, 
and save her from the false spirituality which seeks 
God merely in abstraction. She has a place for 
politics, for law, for commerce, for industry, for 
the athlete and the labourer, the lover and the 
child, no less than for the thinker, the poet, the 
preacher or the monk. 

The Church the Home of Sinners 

Only as we bear this in mind can we get a right 
orientation. Nowadays people think of the Church 
as a club of religious people, the society of the 
respectable. Worse still, many Churchpeople think 
this of themselves. It is the polar opposite of the 
truth. The Church is Catholic because she is the 
home of sinners. Her claim is that none is so 
low but the blood of Christ can redeem him ; none 
so high but he needs God's forgiving love. Good 
Churchmen, in their smugness, get most harm from 



196 THE MEANING OF THE GREED 



the error of the Church select," the company of 
the " moral gentlemen." Many also are kept 
outside because they do not feel good enough. We 
need the Church, just as we need the body and 
blood of our Lord, not because we are good, but 
because we are not. We must get back to the 
idea that the Church is, above all things, a body 
of penitents. The Roman Church, with all its 
faults, has never lost this. Nor does she make 
the mistake of expecting from all the same level of 
devotion. Puritanism is by its very idea the root 
of the opposing error. Even now this dominates 
English religion, and that among many who scorn 
the Puritan virtues. Many a so-called " Catholic " 
congregation hugs itself in this delusion. ' 



Baptism 

That is why the mark of membership is, above 
all, an outward rite. The Church as a definite, 
visible body must have some recognisable mode of 
entry. A sense of goodness, of being saved, could 
not give such a mark. It would throw us back on 
individual feeling. Even a collective judgment 
about conversion would be dangerous — alike to 
those whom it kept in and to those whom it kept 
out. The mode of entry instituted by our Lord 
has never been changed — Holy Baptism. Hostility 
is still aroused at the assertion that this outward 
ordinance can make any one a " member of Christ." 
It is said to be unspiritual, mechanical. This 
objection is due, firstly, to that false spiritualism 
which banishes God from the world. Logically it 
leads to denial of the Incarnation. A second 



THE CHURCH 



197 



cause is the lack of understanding of Christianity as 
life in a society. 

Social Initiation 

Baptismal Regeneration is mere matter of fact. 
No one who joins any society is precisely the same 
person as he was before. What the Church teaches 
is this : (1) A change has been effected in the 
newly baptized ; (2) that change means the life of 
the Holy Ghost within him. If the Church be the 
sphere of the operation of the Holy Ghost no less 
can be true. Whatever be the vital principle of 
the Christian society, it is now within him. Con- 
sider what happens when any one is initiated into 
any society, a school or college, a club, regiment, 
trade union. Freemasons' lodge. He is changed. 
The life of the society begins to permeate him. 
He begins to have new interests, new thoughts, 
new hopes, new enmities, new capacities. In 
proportion to the greatness of the society and its 
more or less all-embracing character this new life 
tends to make him a new person. A new boy at 
a public school, a freshman at college, changes 
vastly in a week. At first he is far from being a 
typical product of the society. The shaping 
process must be gone through. At the end some 
imbibe more, some less, of its spirit. Yet all are 
changed by it — even those who protest against 
it. Yet from the first he feels that it belongs to 
him. The portraits of dead worthies inspire him. 
Its triumphs are his glory. Its little troubles 
make his gloom. An instance to-day would be a 
new subaltern in the Black Watch. He is proud 



198 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



with a new pride — sometimes a little ludicrous to 
his friends. He is more than he was ; no longer 
a mere individual, but breathing " the power of an 
endless life." 

For a Christian this change is wrought by Holy 
Baptism. Christ is the meaning of the Church, In 
being united to it, its spirit enters into him. He 
cannot help this. The Church is the society of 
the redeemed. The newly baptized is living in a 
new world. He is a new creature, the scion of a 
new race. What he will make of this life is doubt- 
ful. So it is doubtful what he will make of his life 
as a member of his own family or an Englishman. 
But he is not the same as he was before. To deny 
the grace of Baptism is to assert that he is the same. 
This is contrary to common sense. This error 
comes of looking at grace as a quantity, a substance. 
Grace means God acting upon the soul. The grace 
of Baptism is the communicating of the new life of 
this great society, which is the terrestrial expression 
of Jesus Christ. That is why we pray that the 
Holy Ghost may sanctify this water to the mystical 
washing away of sin — i,e, to remove the child from 
the natural sphere into the supernatural and to 
make him a " member of Christ, the child of God, 
and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven." 
Baptism gives him letters of naturalisation in the 
" city which hath foundations." He is justified — 
i,e. God sees him not as he is, but as he shall be — 
just as a mother thinks of her son not as the school- 
boy he was, but as the scholar he will be. His is now 
a part " of the inheritance of the saints." In every 
case the gift of life is there. In those in whom it 
is stifled the supernatural life makes return easier. 



THE CHURCH 



199 



The Real Presence 

This life so begun must be nourished. The 
sacramental principle is involved first in the 
Incarnation, then in the Church as a society 
functioning here but with all its meaning beyond. 
It is f ocussed in the Sacraments. The sacramental 
use of objects is common in human affairs. It is 
the principle of badges, colours, uniforms, money, 
flags, ensigns of royalty — i,e, we give to things a 
meaning and a value far different from their 
material purpose. They are something different — 
the royal standard is not what an untaught savage 
would think it, a pretty piece of silk with various 
colours in an odd pattern. The policeman's hand 
uplifted in the street is a symbol of the power of the 
British Empire and the course of all British history. 
These things must be borne in mind when we come 
to discuss the Eucharist. Scorn is heaped upon 
those who maintain the real presence of our Lord 
in the Sacrament of the altar. We cannot here do 
more than say a word or two, avoiding technical 
phrases. What we ask of any believer in the 
Incarnation and the Church is this : Can we deem 
the elements of bread and wine consecrated to the 
gift of Life to be unchanged by that ? A thing is 
what it means. Are the consecrated elements no 
more than common bread and wine after they have 
been set apart by the public prayers of the Church 
speaking through its ordained minister and in 
unison with our Lord's words on the eve of the 
Passion ? Some do think that there is no differ- 
ence. This comes of lack of appreciation of social 
institutions, and of a hard-and-fast way of regarding 



200 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



the outward world. These errors will grow less as 
men understand a little better the implications of 
corporate life and the infinite changefulness of 
material things. It is not the Real Presence but 
the denial of it that is due to an extravagantly 
mechanical notion of the world. Let us take an 
illustration. A piece of paper with " Pay So-and-so 
five pounds " written on it is worth nothing. Add 
to it the signature of a man with credit at his bank, 
and it becomes something different — money. 
How ? Only by virtue of complex social arrange- 
ments. He must have credit. The bank must be 
solvent. Even when you have the notes you cannot 
turn them into gold unless the Bank of England 
is solvent. That depends on the credit of the 
country. Gold itseK is made legal tender by an 
Act of Parliament. Its purchasing power varies — 
e.g, it is less now by a good deal than it was before 
the war. The real value of that piece of paper 
depends, then, on an intricate combination of 
social facts. But given all these things, the 
signature turns a piece of paper into money.* 
Similar is the change effected at consecration. 
Behind it lies : (1) The history of the Church ; 
(2) the original institution by its Founder ; (3) the 
competence of the priest. 

The Christian Ministry 

That brings us to the problem of the ministry. 
Clearly this cannot be discussed at length. This 
much may be said. Only a low view of grace and 
of the Eucharist can be satisfied with vague notions 

* For the correctness of treating cheques as money, see Sidgwick's 
" Principles of Political Economy." 



THE CHURCH 



201 



about the ministry. If Christianity be a special 
kind of social life, the Church must have some 
official representation. Then the moment you 
have officials you have the danger of officialism. 
Clericalism may be the enemy. That is no reason 
for discarding a clergy. 

The Church Apostolic 

The Church is Apostolic, as well as Catholic. 
What claims our loyalty is the society that has 
developed in unbroken continuity since the 
Apostles. Apart from individual inspiration we 
have no means whereby we may be assured of the 
genuineness of grace. God came to us in Jesus of 
Nazareth. He comes to us in His Church through 
a ministry that has come down from Him and is no 
mere creature of our will. Orders in the Church 
can be discerned very early. They have gone on 
ever since. For fifteen centuries this position was 
not seriously questioned. That ought to be enough 
for us. All the baptized belong to the Catholic 
Church. We have no call to condemn other bodies 
of Christians. But we need not hesitate about our 
own loyalty to the developed order of the Christian 
community. If the Church be the central fact in 
the spiritual experience of the race, the great 
witness to the unity of history, we shall do well to 
pause before we throw away any element of its 
age-long inheritance. Even where this is needful, 
it is not done without loss. That prophecy should 
arise independently, and sometimes in rebuke of 
the official element is what we should expect. The 
unworthiness of officials does not invalidate their 



202 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



public acts in the Church any more than it does in 
the State. Those who speak as though it did have 
not thought out the meaning of the pubhc corporate 
character of Church hfe. A priest does not mean 
a specially good man, but a man set apart for 
public functions in the Church. What may be 
the relation of the Catholic Church to those bodies 
of baptized Christians who repudiate her im- 
memorial system we cannot discuss. Charity 
must never fail. We may treat them as un- 
authorised guilds, since they are certainly Christian 
and equally certainly organic bodies. Charity 
may at times approve dispensation from some 
disciplinary rule. Yet this can only be if the need 
of rules he recognised. Claims are sometimes made 
that the Church, being the symbol of Love, ought 
to do without rules. All conditions of membership 
— theological, institutional and moral— are treated 
as hampering to the free spirit of love. If the 
Church is a society this claim cannot be allowed. 
Legalism is an evil no less than it was when our 
Lord fought it among the Jews. The evils of 
legalism do not do away with the need of law. 
Law of some sort there must be. General rules 
guiding the members of the Christian society and 
establishing its official acts are inherent in the 
nature of corporate religion. Law, however, is a 
rough formula. We must beware of a narrowly 
juristic conception of the Christian life. If so, all 
moral effort is satisfied with a minimum. We 
must beware no less of any notions of supreme 
legislative power in the Church of such a kind as 
practically to do away with the Kingship of Christ. 
But that the Church could remain a Church and 



THE CHURCH 



203 



yet be without authority over its individual 
members is contrary to the nature of things. 

" I believe in the Holy Church " implies this. 
Or, to end as we began, " Loyalty to the Church is 
essential to Christian living." This is scouted 
because it means a recognition of authority. " I 
believe " implies trust. We cannot explain away 
this phrase as meaning no more than I believe in 
the existence of the Church. 

Church Authority 

Church authority is a hard saying now. But it 
is the more needful. To the modern mind authority 
in any form is repugnant. A new platform for 
education is now vaunted, which is to remove all 
restraints from children, and never to teach the 
growing boy a lesson he does not like. So in regard 
to the Church. Not that there is a lack of religious 
feeling. On the contrary, it is rampant. " God is 
furiously in the fashion," said a Parisian dame. 
Religion, however, men take on this condition. It 
is to be what they like — Catholic, Evangelical, or 
Liberal. Outside the Church it clothes in a 
thousand many-coloured robes of fantasy the 
aspiring dreamers of high things. It is sincere but 
subjective and capricious. All this is contrary to 
Christianity. The very name Christ signifies 
authority from above. Lord has come to mean no 
more than a title. Men can speak of Jesus as 
Lord and mean nothing by it. But Lord means 
Master. The problem of authority in religion does 
not arise, as some do vainty talk, through the 
pretensions of aspiring prelates. It begins the 



204 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



moment you call yom'self a disciple of Christ. 
You are not loyal to a leader if you follow him only 
where you see that he is right. Loyalty means 
that you follow him where you do not see, on 
account of your belief in his insight. So it is in 
regard to the Church. Belief in her authority 
comes from your idea of human nature. If man 
be only a rational individual, and social bonds 
matters of convenience, then it is vain to talk of 
authority. At most, authority would be only that 
of the mathematical expert. His guidance all 
can accept because we know that it is subject to 
mechanical tests. Logical method works like 
machinery. Given the premises, results are 
certain. 

Human Nature and Authority 

If, however, man be more than this ; if his 
being be compact of love and will no less than 
intelligence ; and if (as Christianity and true 
politics alike teach) fellowship be of the essence of 
personality, then there is real place for authority. 
The spiritual experience of the race is concentrated 
in the judgments of the Church. No one is wise to 
neglect that. Yet here once more a caution is 
needed. The temper of the exponent of authority 
is not what is often supposed. A believer in 
authority does not mean a man who wants to bully 
other people, any more than a believer in freedom 
means a man who wants to do what he likes. The 
test of faith in liberty is willingness to allow it to 
others. The test of faith in authority is sub- 
mission to it ourselves. Here again we must 
distinguish. The believer in Church authority is 



THE CHURCH 



205 



no slave. He has not given his mind to some one 
else to do what he likes with. What happens is- 
this. One of the most important factors in his 
judgment is the collective voice. On any topic 
on which the Church has a mind, he knows that it 
is less probable that that mind is in error than that 
he is so himself. Such a reminder is more needed 
by clever men than by stupid. Authority is not 
designed to oppress the everyday Christian. Rather 
it is a bulwark to protect him against the attacks 
of clever but onesided speculation. This is all that 
is done by a document so apparently elaborate as 
the Athanasian Creed. It guards the main truth, 
the supernatural revelation in Jesus Christ, against 
theories which if logically developed would destroy 
that truth. Also it asserts that the intellect of 
man belongs to his whole personality, and needs 
redemption no less than do other parts of his 
being. 

Authority not Absolute 

Deference to authority has regard to (a) past 
experience ; (b) the collective voice. A man should 
differ from it, where he must, only with the greatest 
reluctance. Yet authority is not absolute. In the 
last resort the Church must not override the 
individual conscience. Cases there are like that 
of Athanasius, when the individual by his courage 
to stand alone has saved the Church. Authority 
gives a very strong presumption. But she is not 
infallible. Nor can any authority, even that of 
God, be purely external. It must speak through 
the reason and conscience of the individual or it is 
not intelligible. 



206 THE MEANING OF THE GREED 



The Church Indefectible 

If we have faith in Christy we do indeed believe 
that the Church will be so far guided by the Holy 
Ghost that she will never deny the purpose of her 
being. This is in technical phrase to say that she 
is indefectible. That does not assert that her 
pronouncements are beyond criticism. It is almost 
universally admitted that the decisions of councils 
rest for their ultimate support on the general 
acceptance of the Church. 

Authority must not Generate mere 
Conservatism 

One more caution is needed. Regard for 
authority does not mean mere conservatism. 
Experience is always fresh. History does not 
repeat itself. No new problems are identical witli 
old ones. Just now men scorn tradition. The 
world is new, they say. New methods, new ideas 
are wanted. " Whatever is is wrong." Let us 
make the world afresh. Ah ! you cannot do 
that. No man and no people can cut the painter 
which ties the ship of human life to its past. No 
age is entirely new. Indeed, if each age had really 
to start afresh we should always be in the primeval 
state — whatever that was. We should each of us 
have to evolve the rudiments of a language. 
Therefore we must regard the past, but we must 
not be ever slaves to it. Least of all must the 
Church be ruled by the "dead hand." "The 
problem is how to make ourselves the heirs of 
history without becoming its slaves." The Church 



THE CHURCH 



207 



of God is the great adventure. We cannot confine 
that to the age of the martyrs, or even to the 
romance of St. Francis. " Now is the day of 
salvation." Antiquarian sentiment has its place 
in religious no less than in national life. But that 
place is a lowly one. 

Faith in the Church means faith in the Holy 
Ghost present. Opportunities greater than any 
in the past are now ours. The scene in front of us 
has more of wonder than all the beauties we have 
passed. But to reach it we need courage and a 
calm mind. The heroic temper will conquer as it 
always does. It has been the ill-fate of the Church 
of England that it has appealed too little to the 
sense of sacrifice, which is bound up strangely with 
the sense of newness. Let us look back, but only 
in order the better to leap forward. 

OGOD of unchangeable power and eternal 
light, look favourably on Thy Church, that 
wonderful and sacred mystery ; and by the tranquil 
operation of Thy perpetual providence carry out 
the work of man's salvation ; and let the whole 
world feel and see that things which were cast 
down are being raised up, that those which had 
grown old are being made new, and that all things 
are returning to perfection through Him from 
Whom they took their origin, even through our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

SOME BOOKS OF REFERENCE 

The Holy Catholic Church. H. B. Swete. 
Christ and the Church. A, W. Robinson. 
The Kingdom of Christ. F. D. Maurice. 



208 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Symholism. J. A. Mohler. 

Have You understood Christianity ? W. J. Carey. 

What is Catholicity ? T. A. Lacey. 

The Marks of the Church, Darwell Stone. 

The Fellowship of the Mystery. J. N. Figgis. 

God's City. H. S. Holland. 

Creed and Clmracter (Lectures III.-IX.), H. S. Holland 

The Bibliography at the end of this volume should also be 
consulted. 



XII 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 

" The Communion of Saints." 

BELIEF in the Communion of Saints may be 
regarded as a corollary of belief in the Holy 
Catholic Church. So soon, indeed, as it is 
realised that the Church Universal, the brother- 
hood of the people of God, is not exhausted by 
that minor outpost of the celestial army which 
at any given moment in history is " militant here 
in earth," but includes also those who have passed 
into the unseen world and of whom we rightly speak 
as " the majority," the idea of the Communion of 
Saints becomes virtually identical with that of the 
Church on its more mystical side. It is disputed, 
indeed, among the learned as to whether the Latin 
phrase communio sanctorum, as originally used, 
meant properly " fellowship of consecrated people " 
or " joint participation in holy things." Either 
translation would fit the Latin : but these are the 
very pedantries of scholarship. The value of the 
clause as it stands in the Creed to-day is deter- 
mined not by any nice arguings about its origin, 
but by its effective function in the living experience 
of the Christian Church. To believe in the 
Communion of Saints is to live as one who is 
conscious always of " a cloud of witnesses," the 

o 



210 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



" general assembly and church of the firstborn who 
are enrolled in heaven," and of our living unity 
with all those, of whatever age or country, who are 
citizens in that " heavenly Jerusalem " which is 
" the city of the living God " — the God Who, as our 
Lord HimseK has taught us, " is not the God of the 
dead but of the living : for all live unto Him." 

" One family we dwell in Him, 
One Church above, beneath ; 
Though now divided by the stream — 
The narrow stream — of Death." 

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks 
in one passage of " the spirits of just men made 
perfect " : in another he declares, with reference 
to the saints and heroes of old time, that their 
perfection cannot be realised apart from the 
perfection of those still upon the earth. " These 
all, having had witness borne to them through 
their faith, received not the promise, God having 
planned beforehand some better thing, which has 
to do with us, that apart from us they should not 
be made perfect." 

There is truth in both points of view. We 
believe, indeed, that " the souls of the faithful, 
after they are delivered from the burden of the 
flesh, are in joy and felicity," that they are " with 
Christ, which is far better," that their life is one of 
growth towards perfection, and that in a relative 
sense the " spirits of just men " may be said to be 
already perfected. On the other hand, it follows, 
necessarily from the essentially social character of 
the Christian salvation and the unity of the Church 
that the bliss of any must be incomplete apart from 
the bliss of all. The Divine Kingdom is not yet 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 211 



realised in its fullness. " We see not yet all things 
subjected to Him." Christ Himself has not yet 
entered upon the complete fullness of His victory ; 
and what is true of Christ must be true also of 
those " many brethren " who are to be sharers of 
His throne. 

There is a further point. Honesty compels the 
recognition that the majority even of those who in 
a real sense may be said to have departed this life 
in the faith and fear of Christ were 3^et at the time 
of their departure far indeed from the completeness 
of spnitual maturity and moral perfection which 
must belong to the " pure in heart " who are to 
enjoy that immediate vision of God which we call 
" Heaven." It fell recently to the lot of the writer 
to speak words of Christian consolation to a young 
soldier whose mother had died some years previously 
and who had just lost his father. His reply was : 
" Yes, sir : I know it's right, what you say : and 
I hnoiD my mother's gone to a good place. Fm not 
so sure about my father It is an obvious defect in 
the Bmdal Service of the Church of England that 
it appears prima facie to suggest the immediate 
"joy and felicity " of all the faithful departed 
without discrimmation. The tendency is carried 
still further in the sentimentalism of popular hymns. 
It may well be that death, as it is the supreme 
event, is also the most educative experience in a 
man's life : that those who have passed over into 
the unseen world have entered upon some new and 
overwhelming experience and revelation of God's 
love, which enables them to make more rapid 
advance in the life of the spirit and to grow towards 
perfection more speedily than was altogether 



212 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



possible on earth. We do not know. But it is in 
any case unreasonable to assume, with popular 
Protestantism, that the faithful departed are 
instantaneously made perfect, by a kind of arbitrary 
miracle, at the moment of death, and are forthwith 
to be regarded as being " in Heaven." There must 
surely be an Intermediate State, a " Purgatory." 

Yet not a Purgatory in the debased mediaeval 
sense which is popularly suggested by the term. 
I mean by Purgatory simply a condition of being 
purified from imperfection and from sinfulness ; 
a state of continuous growth in the direction of 
holiness and of the love of God. In so far as the 
soul, in its growth towards God, comes to appreciate 
more truly both the love of God, and also the despite 
done to the Divine Love by its own past sins and 
failures to respond to Love's appeal, there must 
surely be involved in its purification an ever- 
deepening repentance for the past, an element of 
sorrow and of pain : yet inasmuch as there is also 
an ever-deepening knowledge of God as He truly is, 
an increase in understanding both of the beauty of 
holiness and of the splendour of Love Triumphant, 
the deepest element in the life of souls in " Purga- 
tory " must assuredly be not pain or sorrow but 
rather an increasing happiness and joy — joy in 
God, and in the goodness and love and beauty of 
God — a sharing, indeed, in God's very life, of 
which " Heaven " itself is but the ideal con- 
summation in a Church completed and redeemed. 
It was a true intuition which led St. Catherine of 
Genoa, in her treatise upon Purgatory, the teaching 
of which inspired Newman in his poem, "The Dream 
of Gerontius," to lay emphasis upon love and not 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 213 



wrath as the unvarying determinant of the Divine 
attitude towards sinners. The soul, released from 
the trammels of its earthly body, " flies " (in the 
words of Newman's poem) " to the dear feet of 
Emmanuel," and forthwith becomes conscious, 
in overwhelming power, at once of the Kedeemer's 
amazing love, and of its own inability to stand 
before the " keen sanctity " of His gaze. It is 
this, and this alone, which constitutes the element 
of pain in the purgatorial discipline which the 
repentant soul both claims and welcomes and 
rejoices to endure. It is well that we are to-day 
recovering within the Church of England some 
realisation of the spiritual truth and reality under- 
lying a conception of this kind. It is commonly 
recognised now that the reaction against mediaeval 
doctrines of Purgatory which was characteristic of 
the reforming movement of the sixteenth century 
went too far : nor is the recognition confined to 
the representatives of any particular " school of 
thought." Broad Churchmen " and " Evan- 
gelicals " of the younger type are increasingly at 
one with Anglo-Catholics " and " High Church- 
men " in their perception of the need for a develop- 
ment of doctrine along these lines. 

The crude division of all souls at death into the 
immediately " saved " and the immediately lost " 
is in truth satisfactory neither to the Christian 
mind nor to the Christian heart. It is altogether 
too mechanical a conception to accord with the 
facts of life : it is too arbitrary a solution to be 
worthy of the character of God as Christ reveals 
Him. A great step forward is made when it is 
realised that in respect of all these matters we are 



214 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



in a region of spiritual realities of which we can 
have no exact knowledge. The literal truth of 
what lies beyond the grave is hidden from us. 
We know that all souls are in the hand of God. 
We know that man has within him immortal 
longings which can never find abiding satisfaction 
in the life of earth. The resurrection of Jesus 
Clnrist from the dead has assured us of the life of 
the world to come. For the rest we are in the region 
of allegory and s^^mbol ; and it is important not 
to confuse symbols with the things symbolised. 
We are constrained to operate with the conceptions 
of " heaven " and " purgatory " and " hell " ; 
but we know that heaven " is not a place, but the 
ideal consummation of eternal life in God, only to 
be reahsed in its fullness in a fellowship of " many 
brethren " : that " purgatory " is but a name for 
'progress towards the heavenly state: that "hell" 
is simply a pictorial s3^mbol of the condition of a 
soul so wholly self -identified with evil as to have 
become finally incapable of life in God. 

What, then, in the light of these ideas, are 
we to think with regard to the present life and 
condition in the unseen world of those whom in 
this life we have loved and lost ? We know that 
the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God." 
We think of them as being increasingly nearer to 
God : as being " with Christ, which is far better." 
But what of their present relation to ourselves ? 
Is any effectual fellowship still possible between 
the living and the dead " ? We profess indeed 
in terms our faith in the commimion of saints : but 
it is to be feared that, wherever the influences of 
Protestantism of the more rigorous type have 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 215 



penetrated, belief in the communion of saints has 
largely failed to find any effectual means of 
expression in religious life and practice. It has 
remained, as a clause in the Creed, largely inopera- 
tive : it has not stood for any definite or concrete 
realisation of living fellowship between quick and 
dead. 

The human heart craves for such a fellowship ; 
and the starvation of a legitimate spiritual craving, 
here as always, brings its inevitable nemesis. It 
cannot, surely, be unreal to trace a connexion 
between the absence from popular religion of any 
effectual realisation of the communion of saints, 
and the enormous vogue of spiritualism in modern 
times. Christianity, of course, has no interest in 
opposing itself to investigations undertaken in a 
genuinely scientific spirit and temper in any region 
of research, neither is it concerned to deny the 
inherent possibility of direct communications 
between the departed and the living. There are 
good Christians at the present time who are 
convinced that strange messages from the unseen 
world are occasionally vouchsafed — especially, 
perhaps, in periods of stress and crisis — ^for the 
comfort of those on the earth, and that the spirits 
of those who have passed from the scenes of this 
present strife have been known to manifest them- 
selves unsought, and by mysterious intimations 
to reveal their presence to the living. So also there 
are many excellent Christians who are disposed 
to take seriously the proceedings of the Society 
for Psychical Eesearch, and to look for further 
light, as the result of them, upon the problems of 
life and death. The present writer is unable to 



216 THE MEANING OP THE CREED 



share their attitude ; and, since it is not possible 
here to enter into an elaborate argument upon the 
subject, he must be allowed, without condemning 
others, to express his personal conviction that it is 
not given to man to penetrate, by methods of 
research analogous to those which govern the 
processes of physical science, into the mysteries 
which lie beyond death, and that it is to the spiritual 
intuitions of religious faith, rather than to any 
process of direct experiment, that we are to look 
for light upon these problems. Regarded from 
this point of view, the elaborate and inconclusive 
researches even of the most scientific investigators 
appear at best pathetically futile ; while the pro- 
ceedings of the baser spiritualism are in essence 
nothing more nor less than a revival, under modern 
conditions, of that illicit and demoralising necro- 
mancy which the Catholic Church of history has 
consistently, and in the writer's judgment rightly, 
condemned. 

There is no adequate safeguard against error 
except truth. It is useless to attempt to combat 
the substitution of spiritualism for Christianity, 
or the proposal to combine the two, merely by 
negative cautions and vague warnings against 
superstition. The Church in these islands needs 
to recover the inheritance which is rightfully hers 
in the doctrine of the communion of saints, and 
to give practical expression, in her corporate 
religious life and teaching, to the corollaries of 
that doctrine. The matter is especially urgent at 
the present time, when by reason of the war liaK 
England is in mourning, when there is scarcely a 
household which has not lost son or brother or 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 217 



intimate friend. At no period in the nation's 
history has there been a more widespread yearning 
for some concrete realisation of our abiding unity 
in Christ with those who have been taken away 
from the scenes and relationships of this earthly 
life. The communion of saints, interpreted as a 
purely theoretical dogma, fails altogether to satisfy 
the hunger of men's hearts : it needs to be made 
vivid and actual as a living fellowship of quick 
and dead. 

If we ask what form such a fellowship is to take, 
the answer must be that it can only take the form 
of a fellowship of mutual prayer. It is surely 
an inevitable corollary of the doctrine of the Church 
that her members pray for one another : nor is 
there any bond between human souls comparable 
to the knowledge that each remembers other in 
intercession before the throne of God. The activity 
of those whose life is hid with Christ in God is an 
activity directed consciously towards God on 
behalf of others in union with the prayer of Christ.* 
Self-dedication towards God on behalf of others is 
both the inner meaning of intercessory prayer and 
also the essence of the Christian spirit : it is for 
this reason that Christ Himself is regarded in the 
New Testament as the supreme Intercessor on 
behalf of man. In proportion as those whom we 
have loved and lost are truly sharers in the unseen 
world in the life and the activity of Christ, we may 
be confident that their life is in its essence one of 
prayer on behalf of us their brethren who are 
" militant here on earth." Nor is it altogether 

* Compare the saying, " I shall spend my heaven in doing good on 
the earth," attributed to the French Carmelite, Sister Teresa of the 
Child Jesus, 



218 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 

reasonable to suppose that the}^ are denied the 
knowledge which is requisite to make their praj^ers 
intelligent. True it is that we are in large measure 
ignorant of the present conditions of their life. 
Such ignorance should at least have the effect of 
makmg us chary of dogmatising with regard to it 
in a negative sense. It has been supposed that 
God through the Spirit makes known to them the 
present circumstances and needs of those whom 
they love on earth. More recently it has been 
suggested that since Christ has not ceased to be 
incarnate, and since the Church has ever main- 
tained the legitimacy of praj^er addressed directh^ 
to the still human Christ, exalted in majesty at 
God's " right hand," Christianity must presuppose 
in the case of our Lord what can best be described 
as an extension of His human consciousness, 
whereby it is enabled to become universal in its 
scope and range. To hold that this is to be 
explained as due to a kind of merging of Clirist's 
manhood in His deity is to capitulate in the end 
to the heresy technically called Eutychian ; and 
by analogy it has been argued that in the case of 
the departed also, who are now sharers in the life 
of Christ, there may be in some measure a like 
extension of consciousness, whereby they are 
enabled to be aware of the things of earth with an 
immediacy of apprehension impossible to those 
who are still trammelled by the limitations of the 
flesh. 

To some, doubtless, the speculation will appear 
unduly bold. They will prefer to take refuge in a 
present agnosticism, until the day break and the 
shadov\^s flee away." But there are others who 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 219 



will desire to go farther ; they will desiderate some 
consideration of the practice known as the invocation 
of the saints, a practice which — at least in the form 
of requests to the departed for their prayers — 
dates back to very early Christian antiquity. Our 
English Churchmanship is criticised by our Russian 
friends because — ^in the absence of any avowed or 
widespread practice of invocation — ^we appear to 
them to be lacking in any effective sense of present 
communion with the saints. To what extent, if 
at all, are we to recognise the justice of this 
criticism ? Is it in any degree true that existing 
prejudices against Rome " have prevented fair 
consideration being given amongst us to the case 
for a practice which is not in itself distinctively 
Roman, and which, even if it were, should be 
judged, either way, upon its merits ? The revival 
of invocation within recent years under strong 
official discouragement — often, it must be confessed 
in forms which are unwise, and from motives 
which are frankly reactionary — makes it impossible 
to evade a discussion of this issue. There is no 
doubt that the practice of invocation may easily 
be degraded into superstition. The mediaeval 
period witnessed an enormous development of the 
cultus of the saints in all its forms, and there can 
be little question that in much of the popular piety 
of the Middle Ages the saints had come to take 
virtually the place of God. The sixteenth-century 
Reformers were led to remove from the public 
services of the Church of England all forms of 
invocation, direct or indirect ; and, though there 
is certainly not at the present time any widespread 
popular demand for the reintroduction of forms 



220 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



of invocation into public worship, the question is 
sometimes asked whether loss, as well as gain, has 
not resulted from their suppression. We seem to 
have lost the sense of the Christian family, the 
consciousness of the approach of all God's children 
together to the throne of their common Father. We 
declare in the Liturgy that it is with angels and 
archangels, and with all the company of heaven," 
that we laud and magnify God's glorious Name, 
but do we in actual practice, as we say the words, 
realise their meaning ? And may it not be that 
there is a connection between our defective sense 
of mystical brotherhood in the Church of Christ 
with those departed, and that desolating absence of 
the spirit of brotherhood and fellowship amongst 
the living, which is so manifest an anomaly in 
our modern Church life ? Certainly in the religion 
of the Russian peasants, as described, for example, 
in the works of Mr. Stephen Graham, the sense of 
brotherhood between members of the Church on 
earth is developed side by side with the most vivid 
realisation of their fellowship in Christ with all 
such as in the past were chosen vessels of God's 
grace, and lights of the world in their several 
generations. 

The Roman Church, as is well known, draws a 
hard-and-fast and (as we must needs think) a 
somewhat arbitrary distinction between canonised 
" saints," who are regarded as having already 
attained to " heaven," and whose prayers it is 
customary to invoke, and the faithful departed 
in general, who are regarded as being in " purga- 
tory," and for whose spiritual progress it is 
customary to pray. The Eastern Church with 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 221 



truer wisdom refrains from so rigid a classification, 
and, while reverencing the more notable " saints " 
of Christian history with special honour, neverthe- 
less prays equally for all the faithful and requests 
the prayers of all. An Eastern Christian will with 
equal simplicity request the prayers of his mother 
who has passed into the unseen world, and offer 
his own prayers to God on behalf of the Mother of 
our Lord. What is to be our own view of this 
whole matter ? 

It cannot be denied that the practice of in- 
voking the prayers of the saints may easily be 
attended by obvious dangers. It is difficult not 
to think that those who habitually invoke by name 
the great saints and heroes of the past to assist 
them by their prayers are apt to slip, almost with- 
out knowing it, into a conception of God which is 
less than Christian : they may come to regard 
Him, that is to say, as an Oriental despot surrounded 
by his courtiers,* in approaching whom it is 
desirable to have " friends at court," rather than 
as a Father to whom they have direct access through 
Christ. The conception of particular saints as 
being entrusted, under God, with a kind of delegated 
sovereignity over particular departments of life — 
as where, for example, St. Antony is regarded as 
" the saint who helps you to find things when you 
have lost them,"etc. — is especially to be deprecated; 
and in popular Eomanism there is often a kind of 
badgering of the saints which is far from edifying, 
and seems little calculated in actual practice to 

* See, with reference to the " Sultanic " conception of God, the Rev. 
Harold Anson's essay on " Prayer as Understanding " in the recent 
volume Concerning Prayer, published by Messrs. Macmillan & Co., 
under the editorship of Canon Streeter. 



222 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



intensify the conception of the Church as a 
mystical family, in which the departed are knit 
together with the living in virtue of their common 
sonship to God. Eoman Catholic theologians, it 
is true, are careful to insist that the saints are to be 
reverenced and approached not in virtue of any 
merits of their own but as the vessels of God's 
grace : that it is Christ, as manifested in His 
saints, and not the saints as such, to whom 
reverence is due. Anglicanism has suffered greatly 
by leaving the empty spaces unpeopled, instead 
of regarding the unseen world as filled with the 
living presences of those whom we call " the dead." 
But there would seem to be in popular Catholic 
piety a real danger of making virtual demigods of 
the saints : and the traditional Anglican caution 
with regard to this particular matter has not a 
little to commend it. It may be hoped that if the 
practice of invocation is to be uno^^icially revived 
among us it will be the Eastern rather than the 
Roman model that is followed. Assuming that 
we are right in thinking that those who have passed 
into the unseen world are not kept in ignorance of 
the world which they have left, it is plainly not 
unnatural for one who has been accustomed to ask 
for the prayers on his behalf of some still living 
friend, if the friend in question is removed by 
death, to continue to request his prayers in the 
sphere where he now dwells with Christ, and to be 
comforted by the thought that his friend still 
prays for him with an ever-deepening insight into 
God's purposes on his behalf. There will be many, 
doubtless, to whom even so modified a form of 
invocation as this will make no appeal : but in any 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 223 



case, whether we do, or whether we do not, for 
our own part, directly request the saints to pray for 
us, we do well to realise, with what vividness we 
may, the truth that they do pray for us; to be 
conscious of the " cloud of witnesses " ; and perhaps 
to say sometimes, in our own prayers to our 
Heavenly Father, " May the communion of Thy 
saints be our comfort, and the prayers of Thy 
saints our defence." 

Those who think often of the saints do, in 
effect, find their example and the thought of their 
prayers on our behalf to be a power. They, being 
dead, yet speak : and they, being alive unto God, 
are one with us still in sacrament and pra^^er. It 
is beyond dispute that many thousands of the 
soldiery of France in the present war have been 
nerved and encouraged and made strong by the 
thought of one who five centuries ago (to the shame 
of England) was executed at Rouen by a judicial 
murder as brutal and as disgraceful as the 
execution at Brussels by the Germans of Edith 
Cavell ; and who shaU say that they were not 
helped also — as they themselves believed — ^by the 
actual prayers of Joan of Arc herself, who, being 
alive unto God, is in a true sense still the patroness 
of France ? 

And, if the communion of saints is thus a 
fellowship of prayer, it is equally a fellowship of 
mutual prayer. Mutuality is in truth of the essence 
of fellowship, and if the departed, as we believe, 
pray for us, it is our part, surely, to pray for them. 
Even earlier in Christian history than the invocation 
of the departed is the practice of prayer on their 
behalf ; and many who for their own part feel 



224 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



bound to hold aloof from the former practice yet 
feel instinctively the rightness of the latter. It 
would seem, indeed, that if we have any faith in 
immortality — if we do veritably believe the de- 
parted still to exist and to be alive unto God — then 
are we bound to pray on their behalf. If we are 
to " give thanks always for all men," we are also 
to pray for all. It is strange that any Christian 
should shrink from commending unto the loving 
mercy of God the souls of those whom he has loved 
and lost, from asking that God would grant unto 
them a place of refreshment, light, and peace, where 
all sighing and sadness are vanished away, and the 
light of His countenance shineth for ever and ever. 
True it is that we believe that God will do, both 
for them and for us, exceeding abundantly above 
all that we ask or think. " Your Heavenly 
Father knoweth what things ye have need of " 
— and He knows what things our friends have 
need of, whom we commend to His keeping — 
" before ye ask Him." But our Lord uttered the 
words I have quoted, not as a rationalistic objection 
against prayer, but as a reason for praying. It is 
precisely because our Father knows better than we 
do, and because He will do more than we ask or 
think, that we are encouraged to prattle out before 
Him, as little children, all that is in our hearts. If 
" we know not what to pray for as we ought," 
nevertheless " the Spirit helpeth our infirmities " ; 
and these considerations apply as directly to 
prayer for the departed as to prayer for the living. 
All the rationalistic difficulties and objections 
which men not uncommonly raise with regard to 
prayer for the departed are in principle objections 



THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 225 



against the practice of prayer in general. It is 
difficult to frame a wholly satisfactory intellectual 
theory of prayer ; but the practice of prayer, 
nevertheless, lies at the very heart of all religion. 
We cannot in any case go wrong if we ask, on 
behalf of those who have passed beyond the grave 
and gate of death, for those things which St. Paul 
asked on behalf of his converts, namely, that God 
would grant unto them, according to the riches of 
His glory, to be strengthened with might by His 
Spirit in the inward man : that Christ may 
increasingly dwell in their hearts by faith : and 
that they, in whatever region of being they now 
are, may be rooted and grounded in love, and be 
strong to comprehend with all saints what is the 
breadth and length and depth and height, and to 
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, 
and to be filled with all the fullness of God. 

It may be that our prayer is in a manner already 
answered ere ever it is offered. The time relation- 
ship has in any case but little bearing upon the 
mystery of prayer. Prejudice and pedantry are 
alike impotent to prevail against the instinctive 
impulses of Christian love ; and whatever we 
desire or hope for those departed we are right to 
make known with boldness before the throne of 
God. 

Prejudices in this particular matter are in truth 
rapidly dying down ; many Protestant Noncon- 
formists as well as a growing number of Anglicans 
are learning simply and naturally to commend to 
God's keeping the souls of those who have gone 
before them Avith the sign of faith, and now do rest 
in the sleep of peace. The plain man, who 

p 



226 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



approaches these things without prejudice, will 
have no hesitation in the matter. Nor will those 
who believe that God is a God of love be disposed 
to limit their intercessions to the case of specifically 
Christian dead. For we know that God is One to 
Whom no prayer is ever made without hope of 
mercy, and Who hath no pleasure in the death of 
a sinner, but would have all men to be saved, and 
to come to the knowledge of the truth. 



XIII 



FORGIVENESS 

" The Forgiveness of sins." 

FORGIVENESS of Sins is the first great gift 
which is offered to man through the Gospel 
of Christ. It is the first — and perhaps we 
might say the most important — because every- 
thing else which Christ came to bring depends 
upon it. Jesus Christ came to bring men into 
fellowship with God. Forgiveness is the first 
step to this fellowship, for it removes the great 
hindrance which stands in the way — namely, 
Sin. When we look into the Gospel story we 
find how large a place this subject of forgiveness 
takes. The way is prepared for our Lord by one 
whose message is, "Repent ye, for the Kingdom 
of God is at hand." Our Lord Himself when He 
begins to preach takes up the same message. Nor 
can any of the good gifts of the Kingdom be 
received until people are in the right frame of 
mind to ask forgiveness of their sins. 

As our Lord's ministry continued, the import- 
ance of forgiveness seems to have been often in His 
mind. People pressed around Him seeking many 
other things, chiefly the healing of their bodies. 
He did not repel them, but often whilst He healed 
their bodies He added a further gift for the needs 
of their souls. In one case when a man was 



228 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



brought for healing, He surprised all b}^ forgiving 
his sins first, as though that were the greater need 
(St. Mark ii. 1-12). 

Moreover, bv His whole manner our Lord 
showed that the needs of sinners were His special 
care. They felt strongly drawn to Him, and He 
was so much with them that He drew down upon 
Himself the anger of respectable people. He went 
to eat with publicans, who were social outcasts. 
The standing complaint against Him was, " This 
man receiveth sinners and eateth with them." 
Agam, He was contemptuous^ spoken of as "A 
friend of publicans and sinners." 

A remarkable instance of this occm^s in St. 
Luke vii. 37 ff. We are told that " a Avoman which 
was a sinner " came to Him as He sat at meat. 
She offered Him the respectful but loving attentions 
of a repentant soul. The host was scandalised, 
but our Lord rebuked him and commended the 
woman. He assured her that her sins were 
forgiven, and sent her away in peace. Thus we 
see that our Lord took peculiar pains to insist 
that God forgives sinners, and that forgiveness is 
what men chiefl}^ need. 

But there are two more points that we must 
notice here. In the first place, no matter how 
grievously men have sinned, God still desires to 
forgive them. And He will forgive if the sinner 
asks Him to do so. Our Lord prayed for the 
soldiers who crucified Him, because hardened as 
they were the^^ did not realty know what the}' were 
doing (St. Luke xxiii. 34). They might come to 
know, and then perhaps the}^ would be sorry. So, 
too, the d3dng robber had only to turn with all his 



FORGIVENESS 



229 



heart to the Saviour beside him. The word of 
pardon came at once in reply. 

In the second place, so far from God being 
unwilling to forgive, we are told that there is more 
joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than over 
many who do not need repentance. This special 
joy of God in forgiving sinners is recorded in St. 
Luke XV., the chapter which, perhaps, more than 
any other brings us to the heart of the New 
Testament teaching about forgiveness. God seeks 
the sinner, because otherv/ise he would be helpless. 
No pains are spared because the sinner is so 
precious. Lastly, nothing can exceed the gene- 
rosity and love with which the sinner is welcomed 
on his return. The prodigal son hears no word 
of reproach when he comes back. There is nothing 
but gladness. The tide of Love rises and covers 
all the wrong that has been done. The father's 
only thought is to celebrate a feast of joy. Let 
us eat and make merry : for this my son was dead, 
and is alive again ; he was lost, and is found." 

The forgiveness which God offers is, therefore, 
a free gift. It does not depend upon any goodness 
or merit in us, as though we could deserve it. 
The worst people receive it. The publicans and 
harlots, we are told, sometimes go into the Kingdom 
of God before others. They have no qualifications ; 
but by that very fact, perhaps, they are more 
easily brought to repentance and so made fit to 
receive the gift. They have no pride to keep 
them back by suggesting that they do not need it. 
The fact is that the gift does not depend upon our 
character, but upon God's. God forgives sinners 
because He is Love. His Love has found a way 



230 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



of overcoming all the difficulties. He forgives in 
spite of our sins, not because of our deserts. It is 
simply His almighty power which we see here at 
work. It is a power which never fails ; and this 
is found to hold good in the experience of un- 
numbered sinners who by God's mercy have become 
saints. 

It is a help sometimes to look away from our- 
selves, and to notice what the experience of others 
has been. Probably all of us have met at least 
one person who has had the experience of forgive- 
ness as a quite real and unmistakable thing. We 
have noticed that after this experience they have 
no longer doubted God's Love. He has forgiven 
their sins, and they are now able to approach Him 
in a way which, as they would say, was impossible 
before. In the pages of the New Testament itself 
we find two notable instances in the Apostles 
St. Peter and St. Paul. One had denied his Lord, 
the other had persecuted Him. Yet by God's 
grace both were forgiven and restored. From 
that time onwards they never doubted what God 
had done, bub rejoiced in His Power. The past 
was forgotten in the present experience. 

If, then, we are prepared to accept the guidance 
of the Scriptures, there can be no doubt that God 
forgives. But we must next consider why it is 
that we need this forgiveness. Probably most of 
those who read these pages will be quite ready to 
acknowledge that there has been failure in their 
life. We don't set up to be perfect. We have 
done wrong sometimes ; and we can hardly fail | 
to see that our wrongdoing has been harmful. J 
To say the least, it has been harmful to ourselves. i 



rOEGIVENESS 



231 



We are conscious that a good deal of unhappiness 
comes into our life through our own shortcomings. 
Taking it at its lowest point, if we don't make a 
success of life, most of us are prepared to say it is 
our own fault. We might have done better. By 
not doing better we have injured ourselves. But 
we cannot stop at that point. We have injured 
others as well as ourselves. We are not alone in 
the world. The failure of one always affects 
others in the long run. By our individual short- 
comings we wrong our fellow-men. The moral 
weakling does not make his contribution to society 
as a whole. He is a kind of parasite. He is 
living upon the energies and the strength of 
character which belong to others. In some in- 
stances, we can see this very clearly. A healthy 
family life depends upon the good temper and the 
mutual helpfulness of all the members of the 
family. Bad temper, sloth, unkindness, will all 
tend to break up the family life. But if we looked 
a little further into this we should see that all wrong- 
doing spoils our common life together. Our 
failure, therefore, not only injures ourselves, but 
wrongs our fellow-men. But once again we cannot 
stop at this point. Conscience tells us that there 
is another wrong, far deeper than those first two. 
We have wronged God, and that is infinitely more 
serious. 

This is the only satisfactory explanation of the 
other two facts. God made us to do right, and 
we have done wrong. We have been acting 
contrary to our true nature, and so, like the pro- 
digal son, we have been walking away from the 
Father's love and entering a country where soon 



232 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



we find that nothing can really satisfy us. A want 
has come into our life which only God can fill. 
Yet we have been trying to fill it with the husks 
of lesser interests. It is true that we may be 
occupied with many things which are good and 
useful. But by themselves they have no power 
to satisfy our deepest spiritual needs. For all 
their worth they are little better then husks, if 
we have forgotten God in our pursuit of them. In 
wronging ourselves we have wronged God, and the 
wrong done to other people is a natural consequence. 
In leaving his father, the prodigal left his home 
and his brother. There is no more lonely person 
than the unforgiven sinner. He has estranged 
himself from both God and his fellow-men. The 
Bible tells us that we are all sinners. We have not 
only failed, but we have sinned. " All have sinned 
and come short of the glory of God." 

Now the trouble is, that one of the effects of 
sin is to make us blind to our real condition. We 
don't see our danger, or see it only in part. Sin 
has a way of acting like a drug. It tends to bring 
on a state of indifference in which people don't 
know what is wrong, and sometimes, at last, don't 
care either. What we need most, then, is to be 
roused up, to come to ourselves. God wants to 
forgive, but there is danger lest we should not see 
it. Then we should for ever, perhaps, be the losers 
without knowing what we have lost. It is small 
wonder that some people to-day scoff at the very 
idea of sin, and ssij it is old-fashioned. They do 
not see that this is in itself a sign showing how 
great their need is. 

What, then, must the sinner do ? Two things : 



FORGIVENESS 



233 



lie must repent and believe. " Repent ye." " Be- 
lieve on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved." 
Neither of these two things is easy. They are 
not, indeed, possible without God's help. The 
first thing the sinner needs to do, therefore, is to 
pray for the help of God's Holy Spirit. God is 
longing to forgive. He is more ready to hear than 
we are to pray. Yet, He cannot forgive unless 
we ask for forgiveness. And we cannot rightly 
ask for that gift until we see our need of it. Our 
eyes must be opened to see the state to which sin 
has brought us. So we must pray for light and 
God will assuredly give it. In answer to our 
prayer He will show us two things : His own love 
and our sinfulness. In seeing those two things 
in contrast, we shall begin to understand 
the real guK which separates us from God. But 
we shall also begin to long that the gulf may be 
bridged. We shall want to be forgiven. 

Now there are probably many souls that have 
gone as far as this in the way of repentance. 
They see how serious their sins have been. They 
feel the full force of separation from God. But 
perhaps at this point they are tempted to despair. 
How can such sins really be done away with ? 
Yet to fall into despair is fatal. Perhaps it is as 
dangerous as to remain indifferent. For what 
is it that makes people despair about their sins ? 
It is surely that they have been looking at one half 
of the truth, and have forgotten the other half. 
They have realised that they are sinners. But 
they have allowed that fact to make them blind 
to God's love. It is true that they have sinned, 
and sin can never undo itself. But the power of 



234 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



God's love can undo it, and is ready to undo it 
as soon as they turn to Him and put their trust in 
His love. God's offer of forgiveness through His 
Son is perfectly clear. He is eager to welcome the 
sinner back again. If we know our sin and 
sincerely repent, then only one more thing is 
needful: "Believe on the Lord Jesus." Throw 
yourself upon God's mercy and trustfully ask for 
His forgiveness through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Remember the words : " Him that cometh to Me 
I will in no wise cast out " (St. John vi. 37). 

We have now reached certain clear facts which 
any one who will can discover in the teaching of 
the Bible. We are all sinners. We need God's 
forgiveness. God is ready and anxious to forgive 
if we will come to Him in repentance and faith and 
ask for the gift. 

But immediately a further question suggests 
itself : How does God forgive sins ? This question 
has already in part been answered in an earlier 
paper in this volume (No. V. Jesus Christ and Sin), 
The Atoning Sacrifice of Jesus Christ is the founda- 
tion upon which all forgiveness rests. That is 
the way which God's love has provided. God is 
able to forgive here and now because Atonement 
has been made, and God's righteous wrath against 
sin has been satisfied by this great fact. If, then, 
we still doubt how it can be possible for God to 
forgive sins, let us look to the Cross itself for the 
true answer to our difficulty. For there we may 
see the two things which we want to understand, 
the Love which is able to forgive and the sin which 
needs forgiveness. The sufferings and death of 



FOEGIVENESS 



235 



our Saviour show us what God is like. His love 
for sinners was so great that He gave up His Son 
to a shameful death. On the other hand, we see 
here, too, what sin is really like in all its horror 
and malignity. It is always what it was then, the 
shameful enemy of God's love. The meaning of 
the Cross, then, is that Love has grappled with sin 
and overcome it, because Love is the stronger. 
There is nothing arbitrary or artificial about the 
gift of pardon. Love has won it for sinners at a 
terrible price. Moreover, this forgiveness does not 
let us off the natural results of our past sins. The 
injury which we have done to our character 
remains. After forgiveness we shall still need to 
be made holy. This may take long years of 
struggle. Yet here, too, the love of God which has 
forgiven us will triumph again if we hold fast to it 
in penitence and trust. 

We must now pass on to ask if there is any 
further condition of receiving forgiveness. In 
the New Testament we find that there is. The 
Death of Christ is put first in the preaching of the 
Apostles. But Baptism is always added as a 
second condition. Thus St. Peter, on the Day of 
Pentecost, said : " Pepent ye and be baptized 
every one of you, in the Name of Jesus Christ unto 
the remission of your sins " (Acts ii. 38). To St. 
Paul, too, at his conversion, there came the com- 
mand : " Arise, and be baptized, and wash away 
thy sins " (Acts xxii. 16). These examples are 
typical. In the Church of the apostolic days 
baptism is always the means by which forgiveness 
of sins is first received in the Christian life. Christ's 
gift of forgiveness is for those who are^made 



236 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



Christians through baptism as He ordained. If 
we put together these two facts just considered, it 
will help us to see how God has put forgiveness 
within the reach of us all. By the Atoning 
Sacrifice He has made it possible for all to be for- 
given. In the sacrament of Baptism He has 
provided a way by which it is within our reach. 
This is of the greatest importance. If we are still 
unbaptized, we have only to seek the gift by 
being baptized, and our sins will be washed away 
according to the Divine promise. If, however, 
as is the case with most of us, we were baptized 
in childhood, that fact is of the greatest importance 
to us now that we are seeking forgiveness. For 
as baptized Christians we have already received 
pardon for our sins once. By baptism we v/ere 
brought into the Church, which is the fellowship 
of God's forgiven people. 

But how does all this bear upon our present 
position as sinners needing forgiveness afresh ? 

In the first place, the fact that he has already 
received forgiveness once makes sin in a Christian 
a very serious matter. For at the time of his 
baptism he, or his godparents on his behalf, made 
a solemn promise that he would renounce all sin. 
A person who has not been baptized has given no 
such undertaking. St. John tells us that in the 
normal life of the Christian, sin has no proper place 
at all (1 St. John v. 18). Sin in the Christian is a 
contradiction in the deepest sense. It contradicts 
his whole profession. For he is under a special 
obligation to God ; and he is also bound to his 
fellow-Christians by a peculiarly intimate tie, for 
they are fellow-members in one Body united in 



FORGIVENESS 



237 



Christ. Both of these two great bonds — the bond 
with God and the bond with his fellow-Christians 
— are deeply violated by sin. The Church which 
we have entered by baptism has the great respon- 
sibility of bringing home these facts to us and 
keeping them constantly before our minds. 

That is why the Prayer Book of the Church of 
England has such a great deal to say about sin to 
those who use it. The three regular services of 
the Church are full of warnings and advice on the 
subject. Both Morning and Evening Prayer begin 
in this way. They call us to confess our sins before 
we approach God in common worship. Though 
children of God we are all sinners who have not 
kept our baptismal garments white. It is, there- 
fore, fitting that we should make a common 
acknowledgment of this fact when we seek to 
enter God's Presence together. The same prin- 
ciple holds good still more strongly when we come 
to the service of Holy Communion. In that 
service those that come to receive the Holy Com- 
munion are urged in still sterner words to make 
a true repentance. There, too, they unite in 
acknowledging that the burden of their sins is 
intolerable, and in seeking forgiveness. 

But the Church does not only warn us. It is 
also part of her duty to give us the assurance of 
forgiveness when we have confessed our sins. It 
was through the ministry of the Church that we 
received the first and greatest gift of forgiveness 
in Holy Baptism. Nothing could be more natural, 
then, than that we should look to the Church for 
help, when we are once more in need of forgiveness. 
So the confession which the Prayer Book puts into 



238 THE MEANING OF THE CKEED 



our mouths is answered b}' the absolution spoken 
by the mouth of the priest. Each of the General 
Confessions abead}^ mentioned is followed in the 
Prayer Book services by a form of Absolution. In 
all this nothing is said or done which in an}^ way 
deprives us of om^ right and privilege as Clu:istians. 
As members of Christ we have been brought into 
the w^ay of forgiveness once and for all. The 
Christian has always access to God by right of 
his baptism. He can seek forgiveness directly 
and private^ if he will ; and in answer to his 
^ faith, God Avill renew the baptismal gift if he truly 
repent. Yet, seeing that sin in a Christian is 
such a very grievous thing, he may well feel that 
this private Avay is not all that he needs. There 
is the blinding power of sin, for example. Perhaps 
he has deceived himself into a false secmdt}', so 
that his repentance is quite inadequate. Or, 
again, he ma}^ be in danger of despah and in 
urgent need of some reassm^ance. Now, it is 
exactly to meet such needs that Absolution is 
given in the Climxh. It comes in not to hinder, 
but to help. x4iter Confession, which should 
deepen the sense of sin, there follows Absolution 
to give to the uncertain heart of the sinner the 
confident assm^ance of God's forgiveness. 

This is a general principle which may obviously 
be applied in a variety of different ways. The 
General Confession of the congregation is natm^ally 
answered b}^ a General Absolution. We have two 
such forms of Absolution in the Pra^^er Book. 
At Morning and Evening Prayer the priest makes 
a solemn declaration that God does forgive. This 
is clear 1}' intended to help the people to claim God's 



FORGIVENESS 



239 



forgiveness then and there. In the service of Holy 
Communion a step fm:ther is taken. Here the 
priest actually prays that God will pardon those 
who are present. " Almighty God . . . pardon 
and deliver you from all your sins." This is a 
prayer spoken in the name of the Church, and may 
be regarded as conveying forgiveness to those 
present who dispose themselves so to receive it. 

Thus far Confession and Absolution are both 
in general terms. They help because they are 
done in common and in public in the presence of 
both God and the Church. But they only apply 
in a general w^ay. There is no special mention 
of particular sins. The Prayer Book, however, 
takes us a stage further in two places. The first 
of these is in the long exhortation which follows 
immediately after the prayer for the Church 
Militant, near the middle of the service of Holy 
Communion. This exhortation stands at the 
threshold of the most solemn part of the service. 
It is a public warning which the priest is required 
to read to those who intend shortly to come to Holy 
Communion. It is a warning the chief purpose 
of which is to remind us of the danger of being 
unworthy communicants. If sin is a serious thing 
in the Christian under all circumstances, it becomes 
most serious when he is drawing near to the Altar 
to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. We are, 
therefore, here told of the great danger of being 
communicants without taking pains to put away 
our sins. Next the exhortation goes on to show 
us the best way to do this. We are to examine 
ourselves carefully in the light of God's revealed 
law. We are to ask ourselves questions about our 



240 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



life to see where we have gone wrong. We must 
do this solemnly and prayerfully as in God's 
presence. We are to seek for true sorrow for sin, 
and to be ready to set right any wrong which we 
may have done to our neighbours. This last 
point is specially important. We cannot hope for 
forgiveness if we do not try to be in love and 
charit}^ with our neighbours. We must be ready 
to forgive them their sins against us also, as our 
Lord taught us. We must look upon all om* fellow- 
Christians as though they Avere our Lord HimseK 
in this respect. For they are in Him ; and we 
cannot sincerely seek His love without wishing 
to be at one with them also. We must, then, 
make this real and full repentance with sorrow and 
willingness to amend our lives at all points. 
Unless we do that (and nothing short of that will 
do) Holy Communion will do us more harm than 
good. 

These facts have too often kept awa^^ from Com- 
munion many who should have come. The}^ have 
rightly felt that the^^ could not be sure about their 
repentance. The pit}?^ is that such people have 
not taken to heart the closing portion of this 
exhortation, which so exactty meets their need. 
" And because it is requisite that no man should 
come to the Holy Communion, but with a full trust 
in God's mercy, and with a quiet conscience ; there- 
fore, if there be any of you who b}^ this means 
cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but 
requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come 
to me, or to some other discreet and learned 
Minister of God's Word, and open his grief ; that 
by the ministr}^ of God's \\o\y Word he ma}^ receive 



FORGIVENESS 



241 



the benefit of absolution, togetlier with ghostly 
counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience, 
and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness." 

Warning is rightly followed by advice. The 
advice is, that where trust falters and conscience 
is unquiet a special confession should be made 
privately to the priest.* The confession must in 
this case make a particular mention of sins. The 
reason for this is clear. The priest is asked to 
give a special assurance of forgiveness to a parti- 
cular individual. He cannot do this unless he 
knows the sins of which conscience accuses the 
individual in question. The sinner comes to him 
as to a specially appointed and specially qualified 
officer of the Church. He is asked to judge the case 
for the Church. He is helped in this by the fact 
that he has received authority from the Church 
to " remit " sins at the time of his Ordination. 
He has also received the gift of the Hoty Spirit 
to enable him to use this power aright (see the 
service for the Ordering of Priests). Moreover, 
this authority in turn is derived from our Lord 
Himself, Who committed it to His Church (St. 
John XX. 21-23). The confession then must make 
detailed mention of all the sins which render the 
conscience " unquiet " ; and when this is done 
the priest has power to give absolution. He gives 
it only after deciding in his own mind by God's 
help that repentance is real and complete. If 
he doubts this he may be justified in withholding 
absolution until he is sure that the penitent is in 
earnest. Under these conditions the fullest measure 



* " Discreet and learned minister " was a term formerly applied 
to priests specially fitted for this work. 

Q 



242 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



of assurance possible on earth can be reached by 
the perplexed conscience. 

The Prayer Book gives us one more piece of 
guidance about the use of this " sacramental " 
form of Confession and Absolution. It is to be 
found in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick. 
There the priest is told to " move " the sick person 
"to make a special confession of his sins, if he 
feels his conscience troubled with any weighty 
matter." There follows the direct form of absolu- 
tion which is in general use on aU such occasions. 
" I absolve thee from all thy sins in the Name of the 
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." 
Sin before communion is serious. Sin, in view 
of the possibilit}^ of death, is perhaps a more 
pressing burden stiU. Those, then, who are in 
danger of dying unforgiven are to be urged to 
" make their confession " to the priest. This is 
a special case. The general principle of the Church 
of England is that her children shall use this means 
of grace of their own free will. The language of 
the Pra^^er Book, however, suggests that in many 
cases it will not only be desirable and helpful when 
voluntarily sought. There will be many other 
people whose case is as pressing as that of the 
sick man. Yet through indifference or for some 
other reason they will have held back. Church- 
people will, therefore, expect to find their clergy 
from time to time " moving " them to " make 
their confessions." This will not necessarily mean 
that theii' liberty is being infringed upon. The 
responsibility of decision will still rest with the 
individual, unless his sins be so open and grievous 
that for his soul's sake he must be warned to 



i 



FORGIVENESS 



243 



abstain from Communion. It is obvious that 
there must be some Hmits to Hberty in any society. 
The Church has the power to expel in extreme 
cases. But apart from such extreme cases, the 
Church calls upon us to make our confession to a 
priest only in obedience to conscience. 

If we are given this liberty of conscience, 
however, no man can lightly pass by the warnings 
we have been considering. Moreover, the blessing 
to be received through confession is so great that 
we cannot afford to neglect it. People who go to 
confession find that they obtain through it both 
the joy of pardon and new strength to overcome 
their sins. Perhaps the majority of Christians 
would be vastly more secure in their hold upon 
the way of salvation if they had learned to value 
this great means of forgiveness. However that 
may be, surely the National Mission summons 
all of us tQ face the question afresh. May not this 
strong assurance of absolution be something which 
will satisfy our soul's need ? 



XIV 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 



" The Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." 

HE belief in some sort of personal immortality 



A is as old and as widely diffused as any 
belief in the world. The most primitive forms 
of ancient religion of which we have any know- 
ledge made much of attempts to propitiate the 
ghosts of the departed. And at the present day 
the most backward races of mankind seem to be 
agreed in believing that the spirits of their ancestors 
are capable of affecting their lives for good or evil. 

It is possible that dreams have had something 
to do with prompting this belief in the first instance. 
However this may be, the fact remains that the 
vast majority of mankind have always believed 
that death is not absolute annihilation. And 
as mankind has advanced in civilization the 
belief has tended, upon the whole, to become 
stronger and more definite. Because as the 
struggle to procure the barest necessities of 
physical life becomes less insistent, man becomes 
increasingly conscious that he is a spiritual being. 
And as this consciousness increases he feels more 
and more strongly that the deepest part of him, 
his true and essential nature, cannot attain its 
full development under the conditions of life upon 




THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 245 



earth. They hamper it, and the time allotted — a 
century at the very most — is insufficient. He is 
conscious of such large possibilities within himself 
that he feels that they must at some time in the 
future have a larger scope than earth can afford. 
Human life means so much already that it must 
be going to mean even more. 

The two most highly civilized nations of the 
ancient world — the Egyptians and the Persians — 
held a very full, clear and definite belief in the 
immortality of the human soul : in their eyes it 
seems to have been self-evident. The Greeks and 
Romans were less positive upon the point, but the 
balance of opinion among them was decidedh^ 
in favour of personal survival. The Hebrews 
seem to have had less conception of any life 
beyond the grave than almost any prominent 
nation of antiquity. Their minds were, perhaps, 
of too unspeculative a cast to be strongly attracted 
to the idea. It may have seemed to them to be 
too remote and abstract to be of much interest. 
They were clear that God is to be served in this 
life. Beyond that they hardly cared to look. 
Hezekiah could even speak of death as separation 
from God and as an end to all opportunity of 
serving Him. " For the grave cannot praise Thee, 
death cannot celebrate Thee ; they that go down into 
the fit cannot hope for Thy truth. The living, the 
living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day ; the father 
to the children shall make known Thy truth " (Isaiah 
xxxviii. 18, 19). The passages of the Bible prior 
to the New Testament which speak quite clearly 
and definitely of life after death are not earlier 
than the second century B.C. (Daniel xii. 2, 3 ; 



246 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Wisdom iii. 1-8 ; v. 15, 16 ; 2 Maccabees xii. 43-45). 
Among the Jews of Palestine in our Lord's time 
belief in a future life was still a matter of opinion. 
It was possible to count as an orthodox Jew and 
yet deny it altogether. It was one of the points 
of difference between the Pharisees and Sadducees. 
St. Paul turned this to account when he was 
brought before a court containing representatives 
of both parties. " But when Paul perceived that 
the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees, 
he cried out in the Council, * Men and brethren, I am 
a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee : of the hope and 
resurrection of the dead I am called in question, ' A nd 
when he had so said there arose a dissension between 
the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the multitude 
was divided. For the Sadducees say that there is no 
resurrection^ neither angel nor spirit : but the 
Pharisees confess both " (Acts xxiii. 6-8). 

In this respect, then, as in many others, the 
Christian Gospel did not create an entirely new 
conception. It took an idea — namely, that death 
is not absolute annihilation — ^with which, in vary- 
ing forms, the world as a whole was already more 
or less familiar. It expanded enormously what it 
took, and invested it with a definiteness and 
certainty which it could not otherwise have 
possessed. Thus the Christian Church has been 
able to make more of the life to come than any 
other religion can feel justified in doing. The 
Resurrection of the Dead has always stood in the 
forefront of Christian preaching and always must. 
To a heathen the hope of a life after death cannot 
be more than an adjunct to his creed, and it is 
open to him to entertain doubts about it. To the 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 247 



Christian it is the foundation upon which the whole 
structure of our behef is carried. No one who 
beUeves that death is the inevitable end of our 
personal consciousness can be a Christian at all 
in any sense. And the conviction upon which we 
build is much larger than the hope of any other 
creed. 

This transformation of a hope, which could 
never be quite free from uncertainty, into an 
overwhelming conviction was effected by the fact 
in which the Church has always believed — ^namely, 
that Jesus Christ died and was buried, and that 
afterwards He showed HimseK to His followers 
to be alive by many infallible proofs. These 
demonstrations began upon the third day after 
His death and were continued at intervals during 
a period of some forty days. The accounts which 
we have of them are not complete, and cannot be 
exactly harmonized. But they all testify to the 
one outstanding and marvellous fact — that He 
Who had been certainly dead was now as certainly 
alive. 

It would be out of place to attempt here any 
summary of the arguments which lead us to believe 
that the Resurrection narratives in the four 
Gospels are what they profess to be — namely, true 
history written within the lifetime of men who had 
witnessed the events which they describe. The 
chain of reasoning is a long and intricate one, and 
its strength cannot be fully appreciated except by 
those who have had some experience in dealing 
with problems of historical and literary criticisms. 
The simplest and strongest argument for the 
Resurrection of our Lord is the existence of the 



248 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Christian Church to-day. That is an undoubted 
fact. But how did the Church come into 
being ? 

For, apart from the Resurrection, the hfe of 
Jesus Christ was, upon the showing of His own 
followers, a complete failure. He did not do what 
they had expected. He did not restore again the 
kingdom to Israel. Whatever supernatural powers 
He may have seemed to possess failed Him at the 
moment when He had most need of them. He 
proved to be powerless in the hands of His enemies 
and they put Him to a very shameful death. The 
Crucifixion was a terrible catastrophe, and His 
followers buried all their hopes in the tomb which 
Joseph lent to receive His Body. 

But something changed all this failure infco 
triumph. Otherwise there would be no Christian 
Church in the world now. How could there be ? 
What could have been sufficient to bring about 
the change ? Something so wonderful as to be 
all but incredible was needed to put new 
heart and hope into the dispirited, beaten men 
which our Lord's disciples were on the evening of 
the first Good Friday. The Church has never 
doubted the cause of the change. The Apostles 
became new men with a Gospel to preach worth 
more than all the world beside, because they knew 
that after His death and burial they had seen Him 
again alive. If we do not accept that explanation 
we must offer another, which must be adequate. 
And Christians believe that none can be found. 
Certainly none has been found yet. 

It is difficult to believe in the Resurrection of 
our Lord. But when we consider what the 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 249 



course of history has undoubtedly been we are 
plunged into more and worse difficulties if we 
deny it. 

But when a Christian speaks of the life to come 
he has in view something more than the old doctrine 
of the immortality of the soul. We believe in the 
Resurrection of the Body, and this particular 
article of our Faith seems to be a point of peculiar 
difficulty to many thoughtful people at the present 
day. Immortality of the soul they are ready and 
anxious to believe. But the Resurrection of the 
Body is in their eyes an antiquated conception 
which is now seen to be absurd and impossible. 

The Christian belief has often been interpreted 
in a very materialistic fashion, with results which 
may fairly be described as " impossible " and 
" absurd." For those who hold such interpreta- 
tions are faced with a real difficulty when they are 
asked such questions as, " What happens to a man 
whose body has been eaten by a tiger ? " or "In 
view of the fact that our bodies are completely 
renewed every seven years,- which of the various 
bodies which we have possessed will be the one 
to rise again ? " The Church has never endorsed 
any interpretation which would make such diffi- 
culties real. It is not bound by any misconstruc- 
tion of its words which may have gained currency. 
Almost all Christian beliefs are Hable to be inter- 
preted wrongly because they are so wide and deep 
that it is not easy to grasp more than a small 
fraction of their true content. 

When we say in the Creed, "I believe in the 
Resurrection of the Body,'' what do we really 
mean ? 



250 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Briefly, we mean that ultimately we shall lose 
nothing by death. 

The Body is at present a real part of us. 
It is the indispensable medium of our self- 
expression. We cannot think without a brain, 
or speak without tongue, lips and breath, or 
act without hands and feet. A disembodied 
spirit is less than a whole man. If only a part of 
us is to survive death our immortality is only 
partial. Partial immortality is indeed something ; 
but if only part of us is to survive there can be 
nothing which can be considered a conquest of 
death. Death takes a very heavy and permanent 
toll of us. All that can be said is that it does not 
take quite everything. 

But the Christian belief is that, as we say in 
the Collect for Easter Sunday, Christ overcame 
death ; or, in the language of St. Paul, " Death hath 
no more dominion over Him " (Romans vi. 9). 
And, further, that Christ's conquest of death is 
not an eternally isolated phenomenon, but an 
anticipation of the final destiny of our race. We, 
too, are destined ultimately to overcome death in 
like manner. 

This is a very much larger and more difficult 
conception than the old belief in the immortality 
of the soul. We could not have reached it by 
any process of unaided reasoning. But we believe 
that it has been forced upon us by facts. The 
Church has been led to formulate it by the narra- 
tives of the appearances of the Risen Lord. 

Unless we are to dismiss the Resurrection 
narratives as works of fiction we must recognize 
that our Lord was — as we may say — at pains to 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 251 



convince His followers that He was not a dis- 
embodied spirit. It was natural that they should 
think that He was ; but He made it plain that He 
was not. 

" And as they thus spake, Jesus Himself stood in 
the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace he 
unto you. But they were terrified and affrighted, 
and supposed that they had seen a spirit And He 
said unto them. Why are ye troubled ? and why do 
thoughts arise in your hearts ? Behold My hands and 
My feet, that it is I Myself : handle Me, and see ; for 
a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have. 
And when He had thus spoken, He shewed them His 
hands and His feet. And while they yet believed not 
for joy, and wondered. He said unto them, Have ye 
here any meat ? And they gave Him a piece of a 
broiled fish and of an honeycomb. And He took it, 
and did eat before them""' (St. Luke xxiv. 36-43). 
Compare also St. John xx. 27 and xxi. 13. 

If the narratives of St. Luke and St. John be 
true history, the Being who appeared to His 
followers was a Man, not a Ghost : albeit He was 
not exactly as He had been before. 

But our evidence for the point is not confined 
to the Gospels. St. Paul makes a further con- 
tribution to the belief, and the importance of his 
testimony often seems to be overlooked. Upon 
what did St. Paul base his doctrine of the Spiritual 
Body ? In the First Epistle to the Corinthians 
(xv. 35-55) — the passage is too long to be quoted 
in full here — he develops a doctrine of a " Spiritual 
Body " and its relation to what he calls the 
" Natural Body.'' 

The doctrine is not easy to understand, and 



252 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



the illustrations which he quotes from the physical 
world do not make it very much clearer. I 
imagine that most readers of the Bible have felt 
the obscurity of the passage : I venture to think 
that St. Paul did not understand it perfectly 
himself, because it is a matter necessarily beyond 
our present grasp. I believe he would have been 
much more at ease if he had not felt obliged to 
speak of a " Spiritual Body " and could have 
launched into a rhapsody upon the Immortality 
of the Soul. But for some reason he did not do so. 
Instead he involved himself in what might be 
regarded as a nearly unintelligible and needlessly 
complicated theory. Now it is absurd to say 
that a Jew of the Dispersion like St. Paul would 
have known nothing of the theories of the immor- 
talit}" of the soul current in the Greek-speaking 
world. It cannot be maintained that he could 
not conceive any life after death except in some 
sort of body. He could have \\T:itten of the 
immortality of the soul if he had wished. But 
he elected to write of something different. I 
believe he knew that belief in the immortality of 
the soul is less than the whole truth. As a theory 
it was not large enough to cover what he knew he 
had seen. He had seen Christ and had heard Him 
speak on the road outside Damascus : and he knew 
that what he had seen was not merely a spirit. 
The Person whom he had met was something more 
than that. But exactly what He was St. Paul 
could not say. He used the expression " Spiritual 
Body " as the nearest approach possible for human 
thought and speech. He ranged the physical 
world for such analogies to it as he could find. 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 253 

kFrom the nature of the case his search was not 
entkely successful ; as he himself was doubtless 
well aware. 

The evidence of the New Testament along two 
quite independent lines — ^the narratives of the 
Evangelists and the teaching of St. Paul — is 
overwhelmingly in favour of the belief which the 
Church has enshrined in the Apostles' Creed — 
namely, that as our Lord was after His Resurrec- 
tion more than a disembodied spirit, so we shall 
ultimately possess " spiritual " or " resurrection 
bodies." What will be their precise relationship 
to the bodies in which we are living now we cannot 
say. Nor does the point really concern us. The 
point which does concern us is that we shall 
ultimately have lost nothing by death. 

Now the Christian belief becomes impossible 
upon one hypothesis only. That is, if we hold 
that Matter and Spirit are two entities eternally 
distinct and eternally at war with one another. 
That is very commonly assumed. But it is only 
an assumption. It seems to have been very 
widely assumed throughout the East for more 
than two thousand years. It generally includes 
the view that Matter in all its forms is inherently 
and essentially evil. The redemption for which 
an Oriental looks — especially in Buddhism — is 
primarily from Matter. But Christianity tra- 
verses this theory directly. We affirm that 
Matter, having been created by God, can only be 
evil incidentally : in as far as we have elected 
to make it so. And therefore we look for re- 
demption not from Matter but from Sin. Thus 
there is a Christian doctrine of things material 



254 THE MEANING OF THE CEEED 



as well as of things spiritual. Matter and Spirit 
do seem to us at present to be entirely dis- 
tinct, and we know that they are often at war. 
The New Testament dwells continually upon the 
strife between them. But it is not true that they 
are always at war. They are conjoined in each 
one of us at present, and up to a point they are 
allies. The Spirit makes use of the Body to give 
effect to its motions. It cannot give effect to them 
without it. And up to a point it finds the Body 
a useful and willing servant. Of course, there 
comes a point at which the Body fails and becomes 
a drag and a hindrance. The Spirit is constantly 
impeded by the inability of the Bod}^ to endure 
more than a certain amount of fatigue, or to trans- 
port itself from place to place at more than a 
certain speed. The two are at present mutually 
dependent ; but the connection is not by any 
means — as the Oriental holds — ^wholly to the 
detriment of the Spirit. The Body could not live 
without the Spirit : the Spirit would be deprived 
of the power of seK-expression without the 
Body. 

The antagonism between Matter and Spirit is 
in many ways very real at present. But are we 
justified in assuming that it is real in the sense 
that it must be eternally vaHd ? 

To take an illustration. The words " up " 
and " down " indicate a distinction which is real 
for all practical purposes here and now and cannot 
be ignored. But we know that we should only 
have to proceed a certain distance into space to 
deprive them of all meaning. There is neither 
" up " nor " down " in the interstellar void. 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 255 



We may even go a step farther and point out 
that if " up " and " down " always meant exactty 
what we generally use them to mean, the people in 
Australia would be head downwards. Probably 
most children have at one time been unable to 
understand why they are not. The conclusion 
that because the earth is a ball the people upon the 
other side of it must be head downwards is irrefra- 
gable if we limit our ideas sufficiently at the 
beginning of the argument. It is a simple illus- 
tration of the fallacies into which we are sure 
to fall if we press unduly terms which we com- 
monly use as a matter of practical convenience. 
We may easily read into them a wider and 
more permanent meaning than they can really 
possess. 

I believe it is possible to exaggerate the 
antagonism between Matter and Spirit. It is real 
and vital now, but not necessarily eternal. It is 
possible to conceive a state of existence in which 
even this, the deepest of all existing discords, has 
been resolved and the two are perfectly harmonized. 
And would not that be the most perfect existence 
of which we can form any picture ? And if Matter 
can be perfectly purified and made absolutely one 
with Spirit, then Matter does not lie outside the 
Divine scheme of Redemption. The restoration 
of all things is not merely a phrase. It does really 
include aU things. 

The belief that this is possible does cover what 
we are told of our Lord after the Resurrection. 
His Body could be seen and handled, because it 
was a real Body. He could eat before His disciples. 
But His Body was not as ours are. It was not 



256 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



subject to the law of gravity, as our spirits are not. 
It could appear and disappear at will, because it 
was wholly and absolutely under the dominion 
of His Spirit. He had, indeed, conquered death 
in that He had brought His Body through death ; 
to be more perfectly in harmony with His Spirit 
and, therefore, a more perfect instrument of His 
Will than it had ever been before. His followers 
saw realized in Him the perfection of human 
nature which is the ultimate goal of our life. But 
for us it is still in the future. 

We believe that we may win to this perfection. 
But we do not expect to attain it immediately after 
death. The New Testament tells us very little about 
the life to come. It teaches that there is such a life, 
and that in it men will be rewarded or punished 
according as they have lived upon earth. It also 
teaches plainly that the final separation between 
good and bad is not until the Last Judgment. 
Character does not reach its final stage until then. 
We have no ground for saying that any one " goes 
straight to heaven " immediately after death. 
But of the conditions of the future life it says 
nothing except in metaphorical language which is 
not meant to be taken literally. 

We do not know in what condition those who 
have departed before us are now, but we may 
believe that they are conscious, and that they 
are in a state of conscious progress. Christian 
common sense suggests that no mortal can be 
at the moment of his death all, or nearly all, that 
God intends him to become. He is still stained 
with many sins. But we may believe that if he 
has striven earnestly to conquer his sins during 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 257 



this Hfe he will continue to travel the same path, 
becoming conformed more and more closely to the 
likeness of Christ, between death and judgment. 
But if he has not tried to overcome his sins during 
this life we are not justified in assuming that he 
will desire to do so after death. There is no 
ground for thinking that death changes the 
direction of the will. The Bible lends no support 
to the idea that if opportunities for repentance and 
amendment of life are deliberately ignored on earth 
they will be renewed and grasped elsewhere. We 
ought rather to think of death as an emancipation 
of the will. After death our will will no longer 
be subject to many of the restrictions which are 
imposed upon it by the conditions of life here. 
We shall, therefore, be able to travel more rapidly 
along the path which we have already elected to 
tread in this life — either towards God or away 
from Him. It will be possible for us to rise 
higher or to sink lower than we could have done 
when on earth. But we have no reason to suppose 
that death in itself will be an ennobling influence. 

It may be that every human soul will not live 
eternally. Our Lord has warned us that if we 
deliberately confound good and evil in this life we 
may reach a point at which we can no longer 
distinguish between them. And if we really 
cannot tell good from evil all hope or possibility 
of repentance has plainly been destroyed — by our 
own act. Then we are in the grip of an eternal sin 
for which there can be no forgiveness (St. Mark iii. 
22-30). 

And it may be that as God is the only source of 
all life, the soul which persists in sin until it has 



258 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



ceased to have anything in common with Him, 
until it has deliberately thrown away the power 
of ever having anything in common with Him, will 
cease to exist. Its personal consciousness will be 
extinguished. We msij regard such a view as 
intrinsically probable, and may hold that it is in 
accordance with our Lord's teaching. Such phrases 
as " where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not 
quenched " (St. Mark ix. 44), look to the valley of 
Hinnom where the refuse of Jerusalem was de- 
stroyed. But no living thing was ever brought 
there. To those who heard them the words would 
not have suggested unending torment, but utter 
destruction. 

But, of course, any conclusion which we may 
adopt upon this point cannot be more than a 
matter of opinion. The Church Universal has 
pronounced no judgment upon it. 

The Life Everlasting is not perhaps a particularly 
felicitous phrase. The Life of the world to come or 
Eternal Life are preferable. For everlasting life 
does suggest something smaller than the Christian 
hope. It does not imply more than a mere pro- 
longation of life through unending cycles of time. 
It is probably understood by many people to mean 
no more than that. But this view is not in keeping 
with our Lord's teaching. " And this is Life 
Eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, 
and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent " (St. John 
xvii. 3. Compare also St. John vi. 54 and 1 St. 
John iii. 14). 

The difference between life eternal and what we 
may call for convenience sake ordinary life is not 
only in duration. It is in quality also. Eternal 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 259 



life is life which has risen to a new level where 
death can have no more power. Its quality is 
the secret of its duration. It has not merety 
worsted death in a struggle on what we may call 
death's own ground. It has soared to heights 
where death is not. 

That is why the New Testament does not speak 
of Eternal Life as something which lies wholly in 
the future. It begins here and now. It is won — 
though not in its fullest form — or lost during the 
years which we spend upon earth. A Christian 
does not look simply for unending prolongation 
of life as we know it now. If he did, he might well 
shrink from the prospect. 

Our belief is that human life, in the fullness of 
our whole nature, can, without ceasing to be human, 
be raised to levels far above any known to us now. 
Upon those levels death is no more : not because 
it has been evaded, but because it has been met 
and conquered. We can take the first few steps 
toward those heights now. We can begin to live 
eternally in this present life: that is — begin to 
lead a life of the quality which will make the 
defeat of death possible. And we believe that as 
human life rises towards the level of the Divine 
Life it experiences increasingly a happiness beyond 
anything which we can now imagine. An earnest 
of our happiness has been revealed to us in the 
lives of the Saints, and in a smaller measure is 
not perhaps altogether outside our own personal 
experience. But however vivid and intense such 
happiness may be now, it can be but a shadow of 
the full and ultimate reality. 

To sum up : 



260 THE MEANING OF THE CREED 



Man's consciousness of himself as a spiritual 
being has always forbidden him to believe that he 
is annihilated in the death of his body. But 
though the hope of personal survival has been 
strong apart from the Cliristian Gospel, the 
Christian Gospel alone can transform it into more 
than a hope. 

We cannot explain away the stories of the 
Resurrection of our Lord. If w^e accept them as 
true, they make the undoubted course of sub- 
sequent history intelligible as nothing else can. 
And the Resurrection of Christ has changed the 
hope of personal survival into a certainty upon 
which we may count. At the same time it has 
expanded our ideas as to what personal immortality 
really means. For it has shown us that we shall 
ultimately be more than disembodied spirits. Our 
whole nature will triumph over death. The best 
for which men had dared to hope before was that 
a part of us would survive death. 

We cannot speak positively as to the nature of 
the glorified body which we shall come to possess, 
because it is altogether outside our present experi- 
ence. But we believe that it will be a real body : 
real as that in which the Risen Lord was seen by 
His disciples. Further than that we have no need 
to wish to go. The resurrection of the body can 
only be deemed impossible by those who assume 
that the present antagonism between Matter and 
Spirit is eternal. The Church has always refused to 
admit the common view — which would make the 
antagonism eternal — that Matter is essentially 
and inherently evil. 

It is possible that one final outcome of our Lord's 



THE LIFE AFTER DEATH 261 

Ministry of Reconciliation — already accomplished 
in His own Person — ^will be the resolution of even 
this most deep and ancient discord. Spirit and 
Matter may be made perfectly one. 

The life which we shall then lead will be Eter- 
nal : that is of a quality different from the life 
which we lead now. It will not be merely life 
unendingly prolonged despite death, but life which 
has passed through the grave to a level which 
death cannot reach. We can begin to live the 
kind of life which will achieve this here and now. 

The prospect before us is larger and nobler 
than anything which we could have imagined for 
ourselves. Like almost everything which the 
Gospel offers, it is almost beyond belief. Our 
poor faculties are constantly tempted to exclaim : 
" It is too good to be true." 

The Christian Gospel would be too good to be 
true, it could be but a beautiful fancy, were it not 
for a certain Life Avhich was actually lived before 
the eyes of men. That Life cannot be explained 
away, and in it the overwhelming Christian claim 
and the glorious Christian hope have a foundation 
which cannot be shaken. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



[Books suitable for elementary study are marked witli an 
asterisk *] 

So far as possible, the date of first publication is given in each 
case, and the price stated is the lowest at which the book 
can be procured. 

I 

FAITH 

*H. S. Holland, Art. Faith in Lux Mundi. Murray. 2s. 6d. 
1889. 

J. H. Newman, A Grammar of Assent. Longmans. 3s. Qd, 
1870. 

A. J. Balfour, The Foundations of Belief. Longmans. 5s. 1895. 
A. J. Balfour, Theism and Humanism. Hodder & Stoughton. 
10s. 6^^. 1915. 

J. K. Illingworth, Reason and Revelation. Macmillan. 6(Z. 
1902. 

A. Chandler, Faith and Experience. Methuen. 3s. Qd. 1911. 
W. K. Inge, Faith and its Psychology. Duckworth. 2s. 6d, 
1909. 

W. Spens, Belief and Practice, cc. I.-V. Longmans. 6s. 1915. 
Margaret Benson, The Venture of Rational Faith. Macmillan. 
6s. 1908. 

The Works of Bishop Butler : Vol. II. The Analogy, ed. J. H. 

Bernard. Macmillan. 4s. Qd. 1900. 
*B. F. Westcott, The Historic Faith. Macmillan. 6d. 1883. 
*W. Temple, The Faith and Modern Thought. Macmillan. Is. 

1910. 

W. Temple, Mens Creatrix. Macmillan. 7s. 6d. 1917. 

II 

GOD 

*A. B. Davidson, Art. God in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, 
Vol. II., pp. 196-205. T. & T. Clark. 



264 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



*A. L. Moore, Art. The Christian Doctrine of God^ in Lux Mundi. 
Murray. 25. 6d. 1889. 
W. N. Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God, T. & T. Clark. 
I0s.6d. 1909. 

*J. E. Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine. Macmillan. 
6d. 1894. 

H. Raskdall, Art. The Ultimate Basis of Theism, in Contentio 
Veritatis. Murray. 2s. U. 1902. 

G. J. Romanes, Thoughts on Religion. Longmans. %d, 1895. 
*C. C. J. Webb, Prohletns in the Relations of God and Man. Nisbet. 

7s. 6d. 1911. 

E. B. Jevons, The Idea of God in Early Religions. Camb. Univ. 

Press. Is. 3d. 1910. 

F. J. Hall, The Being and Attributes of God. Longmans. 6s. 

1909. 

H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, 2 vols. T. & T. Clark. 

12s. 1906. 

C. F. D'Arcy, God and Freedom in Human Experience. Arnold. 
10s. 6d. 1915. 

A. C. Fraser, The Philosophy of Theism. Blackwood. 6s. 6d. 
1895-6. 



For this and following sections, see the relevant passages in the 
following dogmatic treatises : — 

H. L. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics. T. & T. Clark. 10s. 
1878. 

*T. B. Strong, A Manual of Theology. Black. 5s. 1892. 
A. J. Mason, The Faith of the Gospel. Longmans. 3s. 1888. 
H. C. G. Moule, Outlines of Christian Doctrine, Hodder & 

Stoughton. 2s. 6d. 1889. 
D. Stone, Outlines of Christian Dogma. Longmans. 7s. 6d, 

1900. 

J. Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, Hodder & 

Stoughton. 10s. 6d. 1893. 
0. C. Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy. Macmillan. 6s. 1916. 

Also the following works on the Creeds : — 

*E. C. S. Gibson, The Three Creeds. Longmans. 4s. 1908. 
A. E. Burn, The Apostles' Creed, The Nicene Creed, The Athanasian 
Creed. Rivington. ls.3^. each, or in one vol. 3s. 9c?. 1907, 
1909, 1912. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



265 



H. B. Swete, The Apostles' Creed. Camb. Univ. Press. 3s. 1908. 
T. Zahn, The Articles of the Apostles' Creed. Eng. tr. Hodder & 
Stoughton. 55. 1899. 

Ill 

THE MEANING OF THE INCARNATION 

*C. Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God. Murray. 25. 6d. 
1891. 

H. R. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ. T. & T. Clark. 
105. 6d. 1912. 

R. L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation. Methuen. 12s. Qd. 
1896. Second edit. 1902. 

E. H. Gifford, The Incarnation: a Study of Phil. II. 5-11. 

Longmans. Is. 1879. 
H. V. S. Eck, The Incarnation. Longmans. 5s. 1901. 
H. M. Relton, A Study in Christology. S.P.C.K. 6s. 1916. 

F. Weston, The One Christ. Longmans. 5s. 1907. 

W. R. Inge, Art. The Person of Christy in Contentio Veritatis. 

Murray. 2s. 6d. 1902. 
P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. Hodder & 

Stoughton. 7s. 6d. 1909. 
A. J. Mason, The Chalcedonian Doctrine of the Incarnation. 

S.P.C.K. 6d. 1913. 
St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione, text and translation, Ed. A. 

Robertson, 2 vols. D. Nutt. 3s. each. 1882-4. 
*P. J. Carnegie Simpson, The Fact of Christ. Hodder & Stoughton. 

Is. 1901. 

C. F. Nolloth, The Person of our Lord and Recent Thought. Mac- 

millan. 6s. 1908. 
*J. Denney, Jesus and the Gospel. Hodder & Stoughton. 10s. Qd. 
1908. 

J. Armitage Robinson, Some Thoughts on the Incarnation. 

Longmans. Qd. 1905. 
0. C. Quick, Modern Philosophy and the Incarnation. S.P.C.K. 

U. 1915. 

IV 

JESUS CHRIST AND HISTORY 

*W. Sanday, Outlines of the Life of Christ. T. & T. Clark. 5s. 
1905. 



266 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



*R. W. Dale, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels. Hodder & 

Stoughton. 6s. 1890. 
P. Batifiol, The Credibility of the Gospel. Eng. tr. Longmans. 
45. 6d. 1912. 

J. Orr, The Virgin Birth of Christ. Hodder & Stoughton. 2s. 
1907. 

G. H. Box, The Virgin Birth of Jesus. Pitman. 5s. 1916. 
*A. C. Headlam, The Miracles of the New Testament. Murray. 
6s. 1914. 

C. F. D'Arcy, Christianity and the Supernatural. Longmans. 
Is. 1909. 

J. K. Illingworth, The Gospel Miracles. Macmillan. 4s. Qd. 
1915. 

F. C. Bm:kitt, The Earliest Sources for the Life of J esus. Constable. 
Is. 1910. 

*T. E. Glover, The Jesus of History. Student Christian Move- 
ment. 3s. U. 1917. 
W. P. DuBose, The Gospel in the Gospels. Longmans. 5s. 1906. 
R. J. Knowling, The Testimony of St. Paul to Christ viewed in 
some of its Aspects. Hodder & KStoughton. 10s. Qd. 1905. 
' A. S. Peake, A Critical Introduction to the New Testament, 
Duckworth. 2s. 6d. 1909. 



V 

JESUS CHRIST AND SIN 

St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo? D. Nutt. Is. Qd. 
R. W. Dale, The Atonement. Hodder & Stoughton. 6s. 1875. 
R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality. Murray. 6s. 
1901. 

J. M'Leod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement. Macmillan. 
10s. U. 

J. Scott Lidgett, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement. Kelly. 
5s. 1897. 

*J. Denney, The Death of Christ, and The Atonement and the 
Modern Mind. Hodder & Stoughton. One Vol. 6s. 
1903. 

P. T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross. Hodder & Stoughton. 
5s. 1909. 

P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ. Hodder & Stoughton. 5s. 
1910. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



267 



H. N. Oxenham, The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement. W. H. 

Allen. 105. U. 1865. 
J. G. Simpson, What is the Gospel ? Longmans. 25. 6d. 1914. 
*J. K. Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement. Duckworth. 
25. U. 1915. 

G. B. Stevens. The Christian Doctrine of Salvation. T. & T. 

Clark. 125. 1905. 
W. P. DuBose, The Gospel according to St. Paul. Longmans. 

55. 1907. 



In connexion herewith, for the Christian Doctrine of Man : — 

H. W. Eobinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man. T. & T. Clark. 
65. 1911. 

H. V. S. Eck, Sin. Longmans. 55. 1907. 

F. J. Hall, Evolution and the Fall. Longmans. 55. 1910. 

F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin. Camb. Univ. 

Press. 35. 6d. 1902. 
R. Mackintosh, Christianity and Sin. Duckworth. 25. Qd. 

1913. 

*C. Gore, The Permanent Creed and the Christian Idea of Sin. 
Murray. U. 1905. 
Q]id,nd\Qi, The Spirit of Man. Longmans. 5s. 1891. 



VI 

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST 

T. J. Thorbmm, The Resurrection Narratives. Kegan Paul. 65. 
1910. 

J. Orr, The Resurrection of Jesus. Hodder & Stoughton. 65. 
1908. 

W. J. Sparrow Simpson, The Resurrection and Modern Thought. 

Longmans. 75. %d. 1911. 
W. J. Sparrow Simpson, Our Lord's Resurrection. Longmans. 

55. 1905. 

*B. F. Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord. Macmillan. 
65. 1881. 

*W. Milligan. The Resurrection of our Lord. Macmillan. 55. 
1881. 

H. B. Swete, The Appearances of our Lord after His Passion. 
Macmillan. 25. U. 1907. 



268 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



H, Latham, The Risen Master. Deighton Bell. 65. 1900. 
C. H. Kobinson, Studies in the Resurrection of Christ. Longmans, 
3s. U. 1909. 

R. M. Benson, The Life beyond the Grave. Longmans. 55. 1885. 

VII 

THE ASCENSION OF JESUS CHRIST 

*H. B. Swete, The Ascended Christ. Macmillan. 2s. 6d. 1910. 
*W. Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord. 
Macmillan. 7s. 6d. 1892. 

A. J. Tait, The Heavenly Session of our Lord. R. Scott. 6s. 

1912. 

B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews. Macmillan. 14s. 

1889. 

H. L. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics. Eng. tr. T. & T. 

Clark. 10s. 6d. 1866. 
*B. F. Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lordy cc. X., XI. 
Macmillan. 6s. 1881. 

VIII 

JESUS CHRIST AS JUDGE 

E. C. Dewick, Primitive Christian Eschatology. Camb. Univ. 

Press. 10s. 6c?. 1912. 
W. A. Brown, Arts. Millennium and Parousia in Hastings' 

Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. III. T. & T. Clark. 
J. Langton Clarke, The Eternal Saviour Judge. Murray. 9s. 

1905. Abridged edit. Is. 
*E. von Dobscbiitz, The Eschatology of the Gospels. Hodder & 

Stougbton. 5s. 1910. 

Compare also some of the books under XIV. 
IX 

THE HOLY SPIRIT 

*H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the New Testament. Macmillan. 
8s. 6d. 1909. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



269 



H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church. Macmillan. 
85. U. 1912. 

G. Moberly, The Administration of the Holy Spirit. Parker. 

7s. Qd. 1882. 

H. C. G. Moule, Veni Creator. Hodder & Stoughton. 55. 

1902. 

A. B. Webb, The Presence and Office of the Holy Spirit. 

Skeffington. 3s. 6d. 1881. 
W.H. Giif^thThomsiS, The Holy Spirit of God. Longmans. 6s. 

1913. 

J. H. B. Master man, I believe in the Holy Ghost. Wells Gardner. 
2s. 1906. 

*T. Eees, The Holy Spirit. Duckworth. 2s. 6d. 1915. 
A. C. Downer, The Mission and Ministration of the Holy Spirit. 

T,& T.Clark. 7s. 6d. 1909. 
W. H. Hutchings, The Person and Work of the Holy Ghost. 

Longmans. 4th edit. 4s. 6d. 1893. 
*W. L. Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation. T. & T. Clark. 
9s. 1899. 

E. W. Winstanley, Spirit in the New Testaynent. Camb. Univ. 

Press. 3s. Qd. 1908. 
C. Gore, Art. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration in Lux Mundi. 

Murray. 2s. U. 1889. 
G. H. S. Walpole, The Mission of the Holy Ghost. Longmans. 

2s. 1906. 

G. F. Holden, The Holy Ghost the Comforter. Longmans. 4s. 6(?. 
1908. 

X 

THE HOLY TRINITY 

C. E. D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology : a Study of Presuppositions. 

Hodder & Stoughton. 6s. 1899. 
J. R. Illingworth, The Doctrine of the Trinity. Macmillan. 6s. 

1907. 

L. G. Mylne, The Holy Trinity. Longmans. 7s. U. 1915. 
*E. J. Hall, r/ie Tn'mY?/. Longmans. 6s. 1911. 
*W. P. DuBose, The Ecumenical Councils. T. & T. Clark. 6s. 
1896. 

J. Lebreton, Les Origines du Dogme de la Trinite. Paris : 
Beauchesne. 8 fr. 1910. 



270 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

H. M. Scott, Art. Trinity^ in the Extra volume of Hastings' 
Dictionary of the Bible. T. & T. Clark. 

Help may also be obtained from a number of the books given 
under II and III. 

XI 

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH 

F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ. 2 Vols. Rivington. 

1842. Dent {Everyman's Library). 2 Vols. Is. Sd. each. 
F. J. A. Hort, The Christian Ecclesia. Macmillan. 6s. 1898. 
J. B. Lighttoot, The Christian Ministry. Macmillan. 35. 1901. 
*C. Gore, The Church and the Ministry. Longmans. 6s. 1888. 

C. Gore, Orders and Unity. Murray. 35. Qd. 1909. 

R. C. Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood. Murray. 6s. 1897. 
*H. B. Swete, The Holy Catholic Church : the Communion of 

Saints. Macmillan. 35. 6d. 1915. 
*D. Stone, The Christian Church. Rivington. 75. 6d. 1905. 

D. Stone, The Church : its Ministry and Authority. Rivington. 

l5. 1902. 

T. M. Lindsay, The Ministry in the Ancient Church. Hodder & 
Stoughton. 105. 6d. 1902. (Presbyterian.) 

W. Lowrie, The Church and its Organization in Primitive and 
Catholic Times. Longmans. 145. net. 1904. 

W. Sanday, The Conception of Priesthood. Longmans. 35. 6d. 
1898. 

W. Sanday, The Primitive Church and Reunion. Oxford Univ. 
Press. 1913. 45. 6d. 

A. E. J. Rawlinson, Art. The Principle of Authority, in Founda- 
tions. Macmillan. IO5. 6d. 1912. ' 

D. Stone, Holy Baptism. Longmans. 55. 1899. 

J. B. Mozley, The Primitive Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration. 
Murray. 75. 6d. 1856. 

F. H. Chase, Confirmation in the Apostolic Age. Macmillan. 
25. 6d. 1909. 

A. J. Mason, The Relation of Confirmation to Baptism. Longmans. 
ls.6d. 1891. 

D. Waterland, True Doctrine of the Eucharist. Oxford Univ. 

Press. 65. 6d. 
*C. Gore, The Body of Christ. Murray. 25. 6d. 1901. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 



271 



H. Wace, ed.,The Holy Communion, 'Revolt of Fulham Conference. 

Longmans. 35. 1900. (Out of print.) 
P. N. Waggett, TJie Holy Eucharist. Murray. 35. 6d. net. 

1906. 

J. Wordsworth, The Holy Communion. Longmans. 55. 1910. 
J. R. Milne, The Doctrine and Practice of the Eucharist. 

Longmans. 35. 6d 1895. 
W. Spens, Belief and Practice, cc. IX.-XL Longmans. 65. 

1915. 

H. B. Swete, Eucharistic Belief in the Second and Third Centuries, 
in "Journal of Theological Studies," Vol. III. Jan. 1902. 
Oxford Univ. Press. 35. 

A. R. Whitham, Holy Orders. Longmans. 55. 1903. 

T. A. Lacey, Marriage in Church and State, R. Scott. 55. 
1912. 

F. W. Puller, The Anointing of the SicJc. S.P.C.K. 55. 1904. 

XII 

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS 

A. J. Mason, Purgatory, the State of the Faithful Departed, and 

Invocation of Saints. Longmans. 35. 1901. 
J. Wordsworth, The Invocation of Saints and the Twenty-Second 

Article. S.P.C.K. 6d. 1908. 
D. Stone, The Invocation of Saints. Longmans. I5. 1909. 
*E. Vacandard, Etudes. Vol. III. Paris. 1905. 
*H. F. Stewart, Doctrina Romanensium de Invocatione Sanctorum. 

S.P.C.K. 25. 6d. 1907. 
J. P. Kirsch, The Doctrine of the Communion of Saints in the 

Ancient Church. Eng. tr. Sands. 55. 1910. 
H. B. Swete, Prayer for the Departed in the First Four Centuries, in 
" Journal of Theological Studies," Vol. VIII. July, 1907. 
Oxford Univ. Press. 35. 6d. 
*H. B. Swete, The Holy Catholic Church : the Communion of 
Saints. Macmillan. 35. 6d. 

A. J. Worlledge, Prayer. Longmans. 55. 1902. 
Gr. Tyrrell, Lex Credendi. Longmans. 55. 1905. 

C. Gore, Prayer and the Lord's Prayer. Wells Gardner. Qd. 
1898. 

B. H. Streeter, ed.. Concerning Prayer. Macmillan. 75. 6c?, 

1916. 



2 



272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

XIII 

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 




*H. B. Swete, The Forgiveness of Sins. Macmillan. 25. 6d. 1916. 
H. B. Swete, Penitential Discipline in the First Three Centuries, 
in " Journal of Theological Studies," Vol. IV. April, 1903. 
Oxford Univ. Press. 3s. 6d. 
H. Wace, ed., Confession and Absolution. Report of Fulham 

Conference. Longmans. 35. 1902. (Out of print.) 
T. W. Drury, Confession and Absolution. Hodder & Stoughton. 
65. 1904. 

E. T. Churton, The Use of Penitence. Longmans. 65. 1905. 
Compare also the literature under V. 

XIV 

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, THE 
LIFE EVERLASTING. 

*S. D. F. Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortalitij. T. & 

T. Clark. 95. 1895. 
S. C. Gay ford, The Future State. Rivingtons. I5. Qd. 1903. 
(Out of print.) 

S. C. Gayford, Life after Death. Masters. 25. U. 1909. 
J. Agar Beet, The Last Things. Hodder & Stoughton. 65. 
1897. 

H. N. Oxenham, Catholic Eschatology and Vniversalisin. W. H. 

Allen. 75. U. 1876. 
E. B. Pusey, What is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment? 

Parker. 35. Qd. 1879. 
*W. A. Brown, The Christian Hope. Duckworth. 2s. 6d. 1912. 
W. 0. E. Oesterley, The Doctrine of the Last Things : Jetvish and 

Christian. Murray. 35. 6d. 1908. 
H. A. A. Kennedy, St. PauVs Conception of the Last Things. 

Hodder & Stoughton. 75. U. 1905. 
E. E. Holmes, Immortality. Longmans. 55. 1909. 
R. H. Charles, Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in 

Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity. Black. 155. 1899. 
J. Paterson Smyth, The Gospel of the Hereafter. Hodder & 

Stoughton. 25. U. 1910. 
A. E. Taylor, Art. The Belief in Immortality, in The Faith and 

the War, Macmillan. 55. 1915. 

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 



3477-9 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 
(724) 779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




0 014 653 626 8 « 



